Maine’s first research satellite was scheduled to be launched into space aboard a private rocket early Tuesday to collect climate data for Maine students studying urban heat islands, phytoplankton and harmful algal blooms.

But the rocket launch was scrubbed late Monday because of a last-minute technical problem with the ground release equipment. The students will now wait for the launch to be rescheduled, a process that has happened several times before.

MESAT-1 is one of eight nano-satellites hitching a space-bound ride aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket, which is slated to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 12:05 a.m. Tuesday, barring any weather or technical problems.

“The excitement is part of the experience,” said Ali Abedi, a vice president for research at the University of Maine who leads the UMaine Space Initiative and oversaw the project. “The launch is exciting. Getting access to space data is exciting. It’s the beginning of a new era in Maine.”

The MESAT-1 satellite when it was under development and being shown to a visiting group of high school students who were involved in the design of the satellite. Photo courtesy of the University of Maine

Abedi said the miniaturization of satellites has democratized space. In the past, satellites were as big as school buses and cost up to a billion dollars. Now, a stack of tech-stuffed cubes no bigger than a loaf of bread can be built for $100,000, giving universities, research centers and businesses access to the stars.

Of course, the rocket has to make it into space – all the way – before the satellite can go to work. Because of a software glitch, the last Firefly Alpha rocket failed to deliver its payload satellite into the proper orbit. It was parked so low in orbit that it was claimed by orbital drag.

The MESAT-1’s Firefly rocket was supposed to head skyward in 2022. After several delays, with Firefly now certain the glitches are fixed, the MESAT-1 was rescheduled for the end of June, but windy weather has pushed the launch back again. Abedi is hopeful that Tuesday will be a go.

Once deployed, MESAT-1 will circle the Earth in a 350-mile-high polar orbit at a speed of about 17,000 mph for up to two years. The stacked cubes are covered by antennae wires and a solar panel on one side, and feature four multispectral cameras that measure different wavelengths of light.

The data will be relayed to the University of Maine ground station directly or through a network of ham radio operators around the world who will send it to Orono for processing. The data will then be shared with Falmouth High School, Fryeburg Academy and Saco Middle School.

These schools won a contest to design the satellite’s scientific mission back in 2019.

A diagram of a circuit board of the MESAT-1 satellite when it was under development and being shown to a visiting group of high school students who were involved in the design of the satellite. Photo courtesy of the University of Maine

HANDS-ON STEM LEARNING

Falmouth will use the data to investigate if harmful algal blooms increase atmospheric temperature and water vapor levels. They hope to develop a way to watch from orbit as the blooms develop, move and disperse, and hunt for a correlation between humidity and temperature that would promote early detection.

“This was such a cool and interesting project,” said Falmouth alum Shruti Joshi, who worked on the project in high school and is about to enter her senior year at Princeton University. She is studying molecular biology. “Really made me feel excited about the opportunities for scientific exploration, especially in Maine.”

Fryeburg Academy, a private boarding high school, proposed using the satellite to photograph shallow coastal waters to assess water quality properties like turbidity and phytoplankton concentration from space. The school will collaborate with the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve to review the data.

Saco Middle School will study reflected light, otherwise known as albedo, and how it impacts the local temperature in urban and rural areas. The purpose of the analysis is to determine whether urban heat islands can be mitigated through architectural designs that reflect more light.

For Falmouth High School physics teacher Andrew Njaa, the project offered students some of the best hands-on STEM learning he could imagine. Joshi and the three other girls who developed the proposal – two freshmen and two juniors at that time – all have gone on to pursue science in college.

“I learned an awful lot as a teacher about how this kind of learning goes,” Njaa said. “What we learned wasn’t necessarily what we expected. About rockets, yes, but about solving problems. It was a low-cost operation that had so much impact. It’s a much more engaging way for kids to learn.”

The bulk of the project’s half-million-dollar price tag – $450,000 of the $522,000 – was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The rest of the funds came from the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine to support undergraduate research and Maine Space Grant.

The satellite was built by University of Maine and University of Southern Maine engineering students, including Joseph Patton, who was a junior at UMaine at the time and is now a graduate student working on his doctorate and working for NASA.