By Diana Setterberg MSU News Service
Editor’s note: The launch date and time have been updated since this story was originally posted.
BOZEMAN – A small but mighty satellite built at Montana State University is scheduled to head into orbit Wednesday, where it will spend at least six months collecting information about solar particles that escape Earth’s magnetic field and enter our atmosphere.
The Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss CubeSat, or REAL, is one of several scientific craft being deployed on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Funded by NASA, the REAL mission is a collaboration between Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Boston University and MSU’s Space Science and Engineering Laboratory.
The purpose of the mission is to study the forces that cause charged particles, released by the sun and trapped in radiation belts in Earth’s magnetosphere, to scatter and zip into the atmosphere along magnetic field lines – a process that sometimes manifests visibly in Montana as the Northern Lights. Each collaborating institution is responsible for a different aspect of the project, led by principal investigator Robyn Millan, a professor of physics at Dartmouth. She and the rest of the team, including MSU associate professor of physics John Sample, will analyze data collected by a powerful, $1.5 million sensor designed and built by Johns Hopkins APL.
During a NASA pre-launch media briefing, Millan explained that the radiation belts surrounding Earth are filled with high-energy particles traveling near the speed of light. Sometimes called “killer electrons,” the particles pose a hazard for satellites, and they also can rain down on Earth’s atmosphere, where they contribute to ozone destruction. Millan said APL’s sensor is the first instrument designed to make very rapid measurements of the electrons as they enter the atmosphere. That information will help scientists understand the forces that cause the particles to scatter, she said.
REAL comprises a deceptively simple-looking aluminum box designed, built and tested for space worthiness in the SSEL. Measuring about 4 inches by 4 inches by 1 foot, it houses the APL sensor, a sophisticated component to control the orientation of the spacecraft, and other mission-critical electronics developed at MSU.
REAL is the latest of many small satellites created over the past 25 years at SSEL, which was founded in the Department of Physics in the College of Letters and Science in 2000. At that time, the small cube satellite concept had just been developed to provide affordable, real-world aerospace and satellite engineering experience to students. SSEL senior research engineer Tyler Holliday said that in the early years, the lab was at the forefront of developing the standard for what are now called CubeSats. He said the total cost of the REAL project is about $5 million – a fraction of the price of larger satellites that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
SSEL engineers have been working on REAL for seven years, and both undergraduate and graduate students have contributed to the project.
“Effectively, we’re focused on educating undergraduate students and graduate students, getting them into an environment where this stuff is accessible,” Holliday said. “We give students an opportunity to come in and work on something that’s actually going into space. It’s a pretty unique thing.”
Many former SSEL student employees have gone on to careers in the aerospace industry, including Jake Davis, now an SSEL research engineer. He began working in the lab in 2020 as an undergraduate engineering student, then continued to work there while in graduate school. As a professional staff engineer, he has overseen environmental test planning for REAL to ensure that the satellite makes it safely into orbit and that it will be able to operate there.
“It’s a big deal to make sure that you can survive your thermal environment in space and make sure you survive your vibration environment during the launch of the spacecraft,” he said. “It was really exciting to be able to work on that for REAL.”
Other former SSEL students have found success in the private sector, said Holliday.
“Our alumni, specifically from this lab, are spread out in industry. We have former students that are working at SpaceX or Lockheed Martin, and alumni that were here in the beginning years that are top executives at similar companies,” he said.
Holliday, Davis and two other MSU team members will travel to California for the launch. Once they return, they and others – including SSEL student employees – will monitor REAL’s location from a ground station in Cobleigh Hall. As needed, they will send commands to the capsule with software that also was developed at SSEL.
“Being able to do something like this in Montana is incredibly valuable for all the students and for the people in the state,” Davis said.
REAL is one of several scientific payloads on the rocket being deployed to study phenomena related to solar and geomagnetic storms. The 75-minute launch window opens at 12:13 p.m. MDT on Wednesday, July 23. SpaceX will provide live coverage beginning about 15 minutes before launch on the company’s website and at @SpaceX on X.
