Welcome

Dr. Glenn Lightsey's research group provides an algorithmic and hardware based education in Orbital Mechanics.   We design, improve, and use sensor avionics and emerging technologies such as the Global Positioning System for spacecraft navigation, guidance, attitude determination, and science.  We also build space flight hardware experiments such as nanosatellites, suborbital rockets, and balloon payloads.  

News

FASTRAC Celebrates 10 Successful Months In Space

After 10 months of operation, both FASTRAC satellites are working well and the mission has met nearly all of its original mission objectives.  FASTRAC was successfully launched from Kodiak, Alaska as the last of 7 payloads off the STP-S26 Minotaur IV rocket on November 19, 2010.  FASTRAC was launched into a beautiful 650 km altitude, 72 degree inclination circular orbit.  After a 3 month initial checkout period the two satellites "Sara Lily" (FAST-1) and "Emma" (FAST-2) were separated from each other on March 22, 2011.  Since then the two satellites have been freely drifting apart, navigating and beaconing their position fixes and health information to amateur radio operators around the world.  To date, more than 8000 beacon messages have been recorded and uploaded to the project web site for processing.  The support from the amateur radio community has been outstanding.

As of this writing, the sister satellites are now approaching each other for their first "re-union" when they will be within crosslink range of a few hundred kilometers.  If both satellites continue to operate normally, it is expected that they will share their navigation measurements with each other via a crosslink and compute a relative navigation solution on-orbit, which is the final mission objective.  This is expected to happen sometime this fall.

FASTRAC was the 2005 winner of the University Nanosatellite Program.  The program, which is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), is a semi-annual competition among 12 universities.  The winning design is provided with a launch into space.  FASTRAC is the first UNP winner to successfully get to orbit and demonstrate its mission objectives.

At this point the FASTRAC project has been incredibly successful.  Congratulations to all the students, staff, and professional engineers that have supported the FASTRAC mission over the years-you did it!