Satellite's anniversary is celebrated

Montana State University’s student-built satellite has now orbited the Earth for more than one year, wildly surpassing all design expectations, according to David Klumpar, director of MSU’s Space Science and Engineering Laboratory.

“We are wishing a big happy birthday to MSU’s grand little satellite,” Klumpar said Oct. 29 in an email to SSEL students, staff and supporters.

The William A. Hiscock Radiation Belt Explorer (HRBE), formerly known as Explorer-1 [Prime] Unit 2, was launched into space at 3:48 a.m. Oct. 28, 2011, and began operating about three hours later. A year later, Klumpar said the satellite remains healthy and continues to gather scientific data on the ionizing radiation environment in near-Earth space, in a region known as the Van Allen Radiation Belts.

HRBE has circled the Earth more than 5,418 times so far, Klumpar said. It has traveled more than 141 million miles, at a speed of nearly 5 miles each second.

“This distance traveled is equivalent to the distance that 798,000 Cats fans, each driving their own car, would travel to get to Missoula for the ‘Brawl of the Wild,’”Klumpar said. “It is almost like three quarters of the population of Montana getting into a separate car and driving from Bozeman to Missoula.

“The satellite has transmitted approximately 2.1 million beacons of telemetry data to Earth – and outward into the cosmos,” Klumpar continued. “Its first radio transmission, traveling at the speed of light, is now almost one-quarter of the distance to the nearest star.”

MSU’s satellite emits a “heartbeat” every 15 seconds, which allows ham radio operators around the world to detect the satellite and report its progress to MSU. The satellite circles the Earth every 90 minutes in an “eccentric” orbit, which means that the orbit is elliptical instead of circular. The distance above Earth is anywhere from 283 to 503 miles.

  Two of those satellites were built primarily within the SSEL. The other 10 contain significant elements that were designed, built and tested at MSU.

“I could go on, and on, and on, but I’ll bring this note to a close with a final thank you to the hundreds of students who have been involved in SSEL these 12 years for your contributions to the program,” Klumpar wrote in his email that drew congratulations from MSU administrators, faculty and alumni.