Completed Mission

Noise of Summer

NASA VCLS Demo 2

Alpha FLTA005 on the Pad

Mission Details

Mission Name:

Noise of Summer

Mission Type:

Venture-Class Launch Services Demonstration

Customer:

NASA

Vehicle:

Alpha FLTA005 Rocket

Launch Site:

Firefly SLC-2, Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA

Launch Date:

July 3, 2024

Liftoff:

9:04 pm PDT

Payload:

8 CubeSats

Firefly Alpha FLTA005 Mission Patch - Noise of SummerMission Summary

Alpha FLTA005, a mission called Noise of Summer, supported Firefly’s Venture-Class Launch Services Demo 2 contract with NASA that serves to validate the capabilities of launch vehicles that support a new launch class and provide more access to space for small satellites and spacecraft. Following liftoff at 9:04 p.m. PDT on July 3, 2024, the Firefly team successfully completed orbital insertion, payload deployment, second stage relight, and orbital plane change.

Payloads

Firefly launched eight CubeSats selected through NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) that provides satellite developers at U.S. educational institutions and nonprofits with low-cost access to conduct scientific research and technology demonstrations in space. The compliment of CSLI CubeSats on a given flight is referred to as an Educational Launch of Nanosatellites or ELaNa. The Alpha FLTA005 Noise of Summer mission deployed NASA ELaNa 43 payloads.

CatSat

University of Arizona

CatSat is atechnology demonstration of an inflatable antenna for high-speed communications.  The “Ah-ha” moment for the antenna technology came to the CatSat principal investigator when Chris Walker took a pause while making chocolate pudding and covered the pot with plastic wrap. Later he noticed an image of an overhanging light bulb was being created by reflections off the concave plastic wrap which had been pulled in by the cooling of air in the pot.

This observation eventually led to the Large Balloon Reflector, an inflatable technology  that creates large collecting  apertures that weigh a fraction of today’s deployable antennas. CatSat’s deployable antenna consists of a Mylar balloon. The front half of the balloon is transparent, allowing microwaves to pass through. The back half of the balloon is aluminized, creating a reflecting antenna.

After reaching low Earth orbit, CatSat’s antenna will deploy and inflate to a diameter of just over one-and-a-half feet CatSat’s demonstration will be to transmit high-definition Earth photos to X-band ground stations at ~50 megabits per sec, more than ~5 times faster than typical home internet speeds. In addition to images, data about the structure of the Earth’s ionosphere will be gathered by listening-in to thousands of beacons from ground-based ham radio stations.

CatSat is a student-run project  involving NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, Freefall Aerospace, the University of Arizona, and Rincon Research Corporation in Tucson, Arizona.

KUbeSat-1

University of Kansas

The main payload on KUbeSat-1 is the Primary Cosmic Ray Detector which will use a new method to measure the energy and species of primary cosmic rays hitting the Earth. This type of research is traditionally done on Earth.

The secondary payload is the High-Altitude Calibration, (HiCalK) that builds on decades of research surrounding Very High Frequency  signals generated by cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere. HiCalK is a demonstrator mission to pave the way for a more advanced version of future KUbeSat satellites. A camera on board KUbeSate-1 aims to spread awareness of the accessibility of space and inspire young minds to truly reach for the stars. KUbeSat-1 is the first CubeSat to fly from Kansas under NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. The mission revives small satellite research at the University of Kansas and starts a new program called KUbeSat that will offer space access to any student research in the region.

MESAT1

University of Maine

MESAT1 involves three missions in one, all designed by high school students in Maine. The science payloads are climate focused and include ALBEDO, IMAGER, and HAB. These will identify urban heat islands, determine concentration of phytoplankton in water bodies, and help predict harmful algal blooms. Four multispectral cameras on board will relay the data down to University of Maine’s ground station for further processing. The University of Maine engineering team collaborated with the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation and National Estuarine Research Reserve System to build the 3U satellite with support from the Maine Space Grant Consortium. MESAT1 will be Maine’s first small satellite to launch under NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative.

R5-S4

NASA Johnson Space Center

R5-S4 and R5-S2 will be the first in a line of R5 spacecrafts launched to orbit that will be tests of a new, lean process for building a spacecraft bus. The team will monitor how each part of the spacecraft performs, including the computer, software, radio, propulsion system, sensors, and cameras. Both spacecraft feature Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Fiducial AprilTags from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland that works to solve the problem of relative navigation between spacecraft.

R5-S4 is also hosting ELROI-SOTU (Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier – Space Object Tracking Unit), a “spacecraft license plate” developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A small blinking light continuously flashes out a license plate number that can be read with a small telescope on the ground to identify this satellite among the tens of thousands of objects currently in orbit. The ELROI system is designed to help solve the increasing congestion and confusion in the space environment as more satellites are launched at an ever-faster pace.

R5-S2-2.0

NASA Johnson Space Center

R5-S4 and R5-S2 will be the first in a line of R5 spacecrafts launched to orbit that will be tests of a new, lean process for building a spacecraft bus. The team will monitor how each part of the spacecraft performs, including the computer, software, radio, propulsion system, sensors, and cameras. Both spacecraft feature Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Fiducial AprilTags from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland that works to solve the problem of relative navigation between spacecraft.

Serenity

Teachers in Space

Teachers in Space is launching a third Serenity class satellite after the successful launch of “TIS Serenity” in October 2022. Serenity 3 offers low-cost opportunities to test educational experiments in space. It has a suite of data sensors and a camera that will send data back to Earth. Licensed as an amateur radio broadcaster, Serenity can communicate with radios on the ground allowing anyone with a ham radio to “talk” to Serenity. A person can collect data and pictures as they are transmitted back to Earth.

Visit www.TIS.org/Serenity-satellite for details on communicating with and requesting photos from Serenity.  Teachers in Space, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization in North America that stimulates student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). They provide teachers with real space science experiences, space flight opportunities, and industry connections.

SOC-i

University of Washington

Satellite for Optimal Control and Imaging (SOC-i) is a technology demonstration mission of attitude control technology, or how a spacecraft maintains its orientation in relation to the Earth, Sun, or other body. One of the payloads is a guidance and control system called SOAR, or SOC-i’s Optimal Attitude Reorientation. The second payload, CMOS, is a camera that serves as an instrument to demonstrate SOC-i’s pointing abilities. A challenge of spaceflight is maintaining autonomous flight under multiple constraints, for example, keeping stability while avoiding pointing sensitive instruments directly into the Sun. This mission will test an algorithm aimed at supporting autonomous operations with constrained attitude guidance maneuvers computed in real-time aboard the spacecraft.

SOAR uses optimization-based attitude guidance methods developed at the University of Washington to compute trajectories in real-time that meet a set of five constraints throughout the maneuvers.

TechEdSat-11 (TES-11)

NASA Ames Research Center

The TES-11 is a 6U CubeSat that is part of the TechEdSat, a series of collaborative projects and missions that pairs college and university students with NASA researchers to evaluate new technologies for use in small satellites, or CubeSats. Students do the hands-on work – designing, building, and testing CubeSat spacecraft systems and analyzing the results – for each flight mission, under mentorship of engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

TES-11 contains several technology demonstrations, including advanced communications, radiation sensor suite, experimental solar panels, an exo-brake, and BrainStack-3. The advanced communication experiment involves the User Initiative Service protocol which will allow the nano-sat to autonomously ‘negotiate’ with ground stations, and later download data.

The BrainStack is a continuing series which uses a kind of graphics processing unit and neuromorphic processors to allow for Artificial Intelligence, or machine learning experiment, in low Earth orbit. The exo-brake is a deployable parachute-like device aimed at reducing the time the CubeSat will de-orbit.

Launch Operations

As another responsive space demonstration, the Firefly team rapidly executed key launch operations within 24 hours of the first scheduled liftoff. The following graphic shows the approximate start time of these operations.

Firefly Alpha FLTA005 Rapid Launch Ops

Launch Timeline

The following graphic shows an approximate timeline (HH:MM:SS) for the key mission milestones after liftoff.

Livestream

Firefly hosted the Alpha FLTA005 Noise of Summer livestream in collaboration with NASASpaceflight.

firefly flight 1

Payload Users' Guide

Ready for Launch