PocketQube Podcast: Ariel University’s Journey
On January 13th 2022, Alba Orbital launched 13 PocketQube satellites to orbit on the Alba Cluster 3 & 4 mission via SpaceX’s Transporter-3 Launch. In the build up to the launch, we caught up with some of the teams who flew on the recent flight.
On this episode of the ‘PocketQube Podcast’, we had a chat with developers of SATTLA-2A and SATTLA-2B, Professor Boaz Ben Moshe and Rony Ronen (PhD candidate), from Ariel University’s K&CG Lab. In this episode, Dr Boaz and Rony give some insight into their mission aims, ideas on how to inspire future generations of space engineers and tips on how to get started building your very own satellite!
TRanscript
Caius Reza 00:03
Welcome to the PocketQube podcast, we've got Rony and Boaz from Ariel University in Israel who've been building a 2p PocketQube, which’ll be launching with SpaceX later this year. So, yeah, it'll be really cool just to get you guys introduced! Just tell us a bit about yourself and your PocketQube project.
Dr Boaz Ben Moshe 00:25
Okay, so, my name is Boaz Ben Moshe. I'm not an engineer; I am actually the head of the department of the computer science department. A few years back, almost a decade back, they introduced me to this amazing high weather balloons in the loon project of Google's and then we thought oh, we can do without them, it's very simple - a PocketQube or a CubeSat. One thing led to another and then we were thrown into that and we have a research group which is mostly volunteers, graduate students and some people who like to be makers and don't want to be in the industry too much. We combine working on the educational part of that but also on the trying to do some research regarding laser communication from PocketQubes.
Rony Ronen 01:31
My name is Rony and I'm a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Boaz. I had a few years working as a software development manager then decided to go back to academia and do Computer Science. One thing led to another and I found myself in Boaz’s laboratory research, and started to build the pocket satellite since then. So, we build few of them and its fun working with small toys and doing the research and enjoying our time.
Tom Walkinshaw 02:15
Nice! You get to play with the hardware quite a lot then?
Rony 02:20
Yeah, software and hardware (laughs).
Boaz Ben Moshe 02:25
We only have just one engineer in our team and he is also a programmer - it's not a very ‘engineering’ Research Group. We are all geeks from computer science and we try to simplify or outsource our hardware issues - although Rony has become really good at it, with his fingers - soldering!
Tom Walkinshaw 02:50
That's really interesting because a lot of software developers want to get into space stuff. You guys are like an example of a CS department actually just getting stuck in and using it as a way to get your code into space! That's kind of like your approach to things because the barriers have dropped so much in recent years, you guys are knocking together a prototype and then you're running all your code on that. How have you found things? Obviously, there have been lots of challenges to start your project. In general how have you found things when starting a PocketQube? Obviously I think before you guys have flown a CubeSat, you started doing PocketQubes - how have you found things?
Boaz Ben Moshe 03:39
I'll explain it a little bit, Rony will elaborate on what our 2p platform is. In a way, we think of it on kind of three levels: 1) the electrical engineering level, which is basically the batteries, the solar panels, the energy and circle of charging, discharging and watchdog and a little bit of hardware. On top of that, we have our basic ‘always on’ main microcontroller which we use at 3.6 with an SD card, coupled to an IMU and to LoRa on a UHF band… 4, 3, something? This is hopefully our simple, ‘low -bitrate-but-reliable’ means of communication. So, our main means of communication is lower on the UHF level. On top of that, we also have the payload. So, now, this is an engineering model. We have a UHF antenna, we have an indicator that says it's actually working, we have batteries, and we have GPS. This is actually an old model that we just play with to see that - the solar panels are now spread differently but this is the main thing. What you cannot see is a Raspberry Pi Zero coupled to a camera. This is say ‘our payload board’: it's a Raspberry Pi, it has its own operating system, you can do Python, you can do open CV (not too fancy stuff).
There's a standard eight-megapixel camera, which we don't actually plan to have eight megapixel images going all the way down, but more of a VGA, and our main research application here involves being able, easier said than done, to aim a laser beam to a base station to a telescope. That requires to have an attitude control determination to an accuracy of 1/10th, or even better than a degree or a milli radian, then to do it accurately, and have all those means of how to communicate, or how to see that. The way we think of it is that this is my base station. It knows roughly where the satellite is, through means of GPS communication or elsewhere. It has satellites, open its LEDs; this is actually an array of 10 iPhone-like or Android-like flashes. With a good telescope, you can be good enough to be able to detect it. Then you aim the laser to that with the camera, you see the laser and then you direct yourself.
Once that is done, hopefully, each stage has like 10% of probability to succeed and then it opens it’s laser, and then aiming towards the telescope with sending a free space optical communication of some sequence. This is not going to be a fancy high resolution videos or something, but it demonstrates the ability to aim a laser which from that, it's relatively easy to do high speed communication of FSO. The main thing here is that laser communication requires no radio licensing. This is our way of thinking so that we could actually communicate with any amateur telescope guy or high school all around the globe. Someone wants to see us published on our website; we want to see you, this is our location over telescope. ‘Could you send us some pop singer song through a means of laser communication?’ and we will be happy to do that - so this is an internet show.
Tom Walkinshaw 08:29
Seems super ambitious! So, how are you guys making that a reality? So, obviously, I remember talking to you a few years ago about it. I was like, ‘oh my God, that seems really really hard’. So, I said it sounds great, but it sounds really hard. So, obviously that's the plan how far along you guys go so far with the prototypes and the iteration. So that’s the plan, how far have you guys come along with the prototype? You guys have iterated quite a number of times with your hardware and you guys had to make changes quite quickly, which is I guess one of the big features of building very small satellites which you obviously couldn’t do if you were building a 100kg satellite, whereas obviously, these are very small things. So, have you guys found that iteration and what have you learned as you iterated the hardware? Welcome your thoughts on that.
Boaz Ben Moshe 09:14
Okay, so, we actually found a few really amazing amateurs which are drawing in terms of their special speciality in the research field, but if they're in the academics, they do it for the fun of it, to help us with the a) the ability to track, say ISS or the International Space Station, and to do that with a telescope is more or less as ours and to do it accurately. So, it doesn't matter if the object is the size of a cigarette box or a size of a football field. From 500km or so, it's a little dot! To be able to track it with a commercial telescope, it is a little bit tricky. So, we found an amazing person, if you want, we can show you his website, he's actually a photographer of the ISS and is using our telescope in our facilities to come up with those amazing things. Actually, his own telescopes are way better than ours but he takes amazing videos of the ISS and some other satellites.
So, we have them and we came across this faculty member from physics who helps us a lot to get a good glimpse of how to operate robotic telescopes, because one of our thoughts is to be able to come up with a sub $1,000 ground station which is also radio and optical. So, a high school could see our satellite for real. Then to having an APD and after launch satellite photo shoot - to be able to receive our data is technical, but it's doable. From that point of view, ground station and experiments were rather optimistic that we were there. We performed over 20 high altitude balloons experiments with LoRa to make sure it works and then we find it's really fun so, we keep doing it. It works for us and usually it bursts after 100 kilometers. But we pushed more than that. Radio wise, link budget wise, it seems that we're going to be in a good condition. We don't take ourselves seriously in the sense that it needs to work. We could really settle for a few beacons from space, anything else with that - it's a lot of fun. Along the way, Rony, maybe you could elaborate more, but along the way, we became relatively good in producing our platform of batteries, which actually are manufactured for, you know those Vapor electric cigarettes?
Tom Walkinshaw 12:07
Yeah. the vaporise-y things?
Boaz Ben Moshe 12:08
These are the batteries we use.
Tom Walkinshaw
Nice!
Boaz Ben Moshe
We test them quite a lot. We have a testing facility for batteries, but they're really good batteries and you don’t need a defense approval for those batteries. You could get them from a nice shopping centre in Israel. In a way, what we do, we become relatively practiced - we're practicing ourselves in building those platforms and somehow, we converge to that platform and at least 80% of it is standard. So, after building, say the sixth or the seventh satellite, there's the practice makes perfect. So, we're better in building that and our bill of materials decreased because we were doing it in a relatively large number. We're rather optimistic about that, but in terms of being able to aim the satellite and have the laser, we would settle for a beacon from space, and then being able to at least stop the movement of the satellites while in orbit. So, if we were able to stop that, and you will see that through the gyro, we will be extremely happy, anything more than that is being greedy. We are currently not trying to be greedy on that, but we are optimistic that we're not going to stop here. So, there’s going to be SATTLA-3 and maybe 254 - Elon Musk has 1000s of them, so why not? So, we really think that on SATTLA-3 we would have a better chance of doing serious laser communication and maybe on the 10th one, it could be something which is really applicable for people.
Tom Walkinshaw 13:51
You guys say you aren’t really from a ‘heavy engineering’ background, which is really cool! When did you first hear about PocketQubes and what made you get into them?
Boaz Ben Moshe 14:02
We started with, I guess like most people, from those cubesats. Actually my laboratory, this big mess behind me, is called the Nano-satellite Research Center because we didn't think, like coming from physics or industry, we thought nano is the smallest and then they come with Pico. We started with being very structured one liter and it was extremely harder to build. We thought at first, we wanted to have as much space as we can and we want it to be as standardized as possible, but we found that the interface for the cubesats doesn't matter if it’s 1U or 0.5U or 3U, all those aluminum rails which should be there and everything is extremely complicated, while the interface to pocket cube is basically a PCB and it is something you can get from buildyourownpcb.com or whatever, and they all come in very nice and working - it's just a matter of manufacturing it properly, so, the interface is extremely simple. So, the way we did is that we came across, we tried to simplify our process, both in terms of costs, and in terms of manufacturing and then a few years back we saw some amateurs talking about ‘pumpkin’. We delivered and said, if you can have all your 5g in your Smartphone, which is less than I guess, 1/10 of a liter, why not do that on a piece scale? Now, we are currently happy with that.
Tom Walkinshaw 15:51
Yeah, that’s awesome! There’s so much to unpack in that. Rony, I think you had the ground station in there, you're saying it's the same size as the satellite? I assume you’ve been working on that along with the current model you have there in your desk?
Rony 16:13
Yeah, actually, it's more than the 2p that we have; it's connected to the antenna that we have on the wharf and also to the internet. So, we want to get the data on our website or on the telegram. to connect it to radio amateurs who will receive the signals. Yeah, and it's going hand in hand by hand, we are working on both of them together. Since we don't have any one connected to the satellite, we need a way to talk to it, to test it, to make sure that the function is working. So yes, I'm using this one. It’s also a way of testing the satellite.
Tom Walkinshaw 17:11
Yeah, so you’re just like testing in the lab and making sure the thing works and just debugging it. Is that the main thing?
Rony Ronen 17:18
Yeah, exactly! You know this is the part of my software developer trying to debug the code, find bugs, fix them, and make sure that everything is working as expected. Yeah they are part of the testing... not the testing, the development lifecycle!
Tom Walkinshaw 17:45
Cool. Yes, I think you touched on something Boaz about the cost of failure being very small. So, I guess that's a really big part of your mentality of just trying things, the hardware is super cheap, and launches are pretty cheap too, compared to bigger satellites. So, is that a part of your guy's philosophy? We're just gonna try stuff and iterate? When you write code, obviously, the code doesn’t always compile first time, you know sometimes it’s bugged, but in satellite development it's the opposite. It has to work first time because a lot of people's livelihoods are on the line, whereas you guys are taking a really modern lean approach to satellite building. Explain a little bit about that and why you guys decided to go that route. I guess that makes sense with the pocketqubes that you guys are developing?
Boaz Ben Moshe 18:34
So, one thing is, we're computer scientists. So, whenever the USB socket is broken, we panic that oh, something got broken as if that’s a major thing. Something got broken and we need to solder that or it is the way to do that and maybe it won’t work. But in a way, computer science is open source, so why not use it? So, you look around us, everything is IoT - my fridge wants to talk, my vacuum cleaner is doing something crazy and it’s running riot (laughs). So, why not do it in the satellite if you have this amazing infrastructure? So, if a data was received somewhere with a colleague of mine in Cyprus, and he could tweet me or send me a telegram or send all of us to know, then why not do that? Also, I want to mention that we have some educational thought behind that and we would like to use this platform we call it ‘SATTLA-0’. We want to make an amateur kit for grad for high school and undergraduate projects. The idea should be in the pricing but the University says you won't make any money. I don't care, say 100 or a few $100, and they will have their own kits, they will have a ground station, they can talk, you could program that and you can do a lot of image processing, learn physics about it and everything. If you have schools, maybe a few kilometers or dozens of kilometers away, they can talk radio wise, and it’s all LoRa. Even with other LoRa satellites, you can also receive other satellite communication, if it's all well put well on the ground. So, the idea we want to use is the Apollo effect, and to do it on a smaller scale, and those satellites also communicate through Bluetooth. So, you can do some sort of that, but it's actually becoming a big part of our current work, to try to open all the sources - open source is easy, but to have it well documented and suitable for amateurs is an issue. We really, really, would like to do it as a pilot in Israel and then all around. If that will be a platform for universities or schools to do that and down the road, few of them will actually use it for real, not just engineering but for flight model, then we will be happy about it.
Tom Walkinshaw 21:07
Well, that’s it! If you can make it easier for people to start building by having kits and in the last episode, we're chatting to the Brazilian team about the kits in Brazil and stuff. It's great that in Israel that there will be something similar where people can learn the basics, and you guys can be like working on the year versions and then learn things and starting to build more sophisticated spacecraft with more capabilities. I think the whole intense ecosystem means all levels of abilities and competencies and that's super awesome.
Caius Reza
It would’ve been really cool to have that back in school, just think about it!
Tom Walkinshaw
I just wish it was around when I was in school! To be honest, that would have been so much more fun
Caius Reza
It's crazy to think that with PocketQubes, it is kids who can access space at one point, at this kind of low entry point.
Tom Walkinshaw
We've already launched kids!
Boaz Ben Moshe 22:01
We did some background check on that. Apparently, everything in schools is for some reason, I don't know, bureaucracy and so on, it's very expensive, like a laptop, which would cost $500, I don’t know where, say in the shops. In the schools, it costs more because you need insurance and it’s the same with robotics. So, apparently, like in Israel, there's very few robotics lab like ‘toy robotics’, and in the school, they don't use their Smartphones for programming. We want to twist that, because kids use their smartphones all the time now, why not do that? We even thought of some very simple mechanics. CubeSat actually fits into some sort of vacuum, not vacuum… a bottle, like a water bottle, those nice water bottles that they twist and spin, you can do that, and then it's transparent enough, then the solar will work, and then throw it in the ocean. If it cost $100, then just throw it in the ocean and see where it goes. Here and there, it would receive those LoRa transmitters from all around and it could be like a digital message in the bottle, something like I mentioned. One thought of doing that, I don't know where we go from that but we think that on that platform, it's an enabler for people to play, because drones attract more people into research than all the fancy Formula One cars because they're playable, they’re there. So, one thing we keep on thinking is that to do those payload boards, which is has those way of adding sensors and stuff like that, and also to allow that to be flown through a high-altitude balloon and come up with a parachute. So, hopefully, people could somehow rescue that if it's not falling to the middle of the ocean.
Tom Walkinshaw 24:30
Yeah, there are so many different ways you can take it and I think you hit a point. Obviously, there's nothing quite like building hardware and getting your hardware out in space. It just gets people so passionate, and certainly, when I tell people what we do at Alba and stuff, people can’t believe that we fly things in space. It seems like this other realm you're sending into the fourth dimension or something, people can't quite obviously be complex for being there, obviously. Most people will never be able to get there because of the cost but you know the idea that you can send some sort of device you've created up there, is just kind of mind blowing and then you start thinking that ‘Geez, this could be really transformational level’, a lot of people realize this and we start to open up the gate for that. There’s definitely this big push, certainly in Israel, it's like a very high-tech country and you guys are doing a great job on that but certainly the more you can get kind of the next generation passionate about building things and for me, obviously really being able to fly something in space kind of got me pumped up. Obviously, PocketQubes are the lowest cost entry point to do that to have stuff flown and fly regularly. So, this is great for me and then Alba is doing pretty well on the back of that and you guys are starting to fly stuff as well, which is pretty awesome.
Caius Reza
I was gonna ask, what's the space industry like in Israel at the moment?
Boaz Ben Moshe 26:01
I know I'm a professor in university, I don't really understand industry wise, if you look at students, most of them are doing a lot of AI for big companies or small companies but mostly making AI, have a nicer filter for Instagram or important things like deciding where to do discount on the old bakery that’s left over. Israel has the traditional industry which is very ‘old space’. Big GEO satellites and some of it has to do with a very regulated industry or defense motivated. Currently, there are quite a lot of people looking at the Starlink and try to do Starlink motivated industry, meaning if you could have a drone, which is connected through starlinks, then maybe you don't need something else. If you could have a robotic telescope in the middle of the desert where nobody is there but you have amazing communications for starlinks then it's quite a lot. I don't think most students would attract that as their way to maximize their future income. But luckily, we have a share of students that like to explore and to play with that. There's quite a lot of strange and interesting industry, I know very little.
Tom Walkinshaw 28:04
So how are you guys feeling about the satellites being shipped? I think we're probably looking at the next month or so. You guys are gonna come over? Are you nervous? Are you confident? Are you unconfident? We are launching two 2P's with you guys, on the upcoming SpaceX rideshare pretty soon and we probably have 20 satellites being launched in the next two or three months. What are you guys feeling for that? Are you guys excited or nervous?
Rony Ronen 29:19
I will tell you we are really excited for that.
Boaz Ben Moshe
I’m nervous! (laughs)
Rony Ronen
With the team that we are building the satellite with, we get a lot of trust of what we achieved so far. So, I have a lot of trust in our system, in our satellite. Actually, we will start building four satellites. We will launch two of them for testing and laboratory research. We are planning to do that next week, it will be a hectic week, but it will be a very fun week. I hope this time we will confirm a beacon from space, unlike our SATTLA-1, but this is for research.
Tom Walkinshaw 30:25
Fingers crossed for a smooth launch. We’re hoping that all the teams do really well. Certainly, the last time when we launched, everyone was really pumped up and it was really exciting. Hopefully we’ll have the same thing again on this mission. Falcon 9 is pretty reliable.
Boaz Ben Moshe 30:58
Oh yes, they are reliable - it’s us! One thing we tried to do on this couple spare satellites, we want to do a measure of ranging between them. So, we have 2.4 ranging component, which is a little experiment, but would be nice for a future thought of doing some sort of swarm, or those remote sensing swarms or stuff like that, but trying to do ranging would be very appealing for us. I'm a little bit nervous when I think about it, because again, computer science people are binary, either you succeed or not. So, we want to have a few beacons from space, please for us. Other than that, people won’t listen! The CEO of the university won't be really into the details, whether the measurements were all the way through or we had some sort of a glitch, but if it failed he says ‘Ugh. You’re failing again’. I've had my fair share of fails but if it succeeds, then we really hope we would have a good boost for our graduate program for multidisciplinary, STEM or industrial scientific and engineering research programs, and to keep on doing this as a project. So, to be an annual thing, we will have an annual amateur University platform in space, and we will take some of these baby steps to get better!
Caius Reza 32:39
No better PR than saying you've reached orbit, that's pretty cool!
Tom Walkinshaw
That's the thing if you can develop it within a semester, because obviously, PocketQubes are gonna have shorter development cycles, then you can actually start to run these things annually. That ties up with alba launch, which will be running two launches this year but generally speaking, we're picking up that cadence to go for multiple launches per year now. Certainly, it's pretty cool for builders to get their stuff on orbit right? and then they get on the next bus. Well, I really appreciate your time and we'll be taking up quite a little bit already. I don't want to hold you guys back from shipping the satellites to us. So, if you just want to get a wrap up, I don't know what sounds like a good point, something you guys really appreciate. If it is anything else you want to add for the podcast, just in general, if you were starting out again, maybe two or three years ago that you guys started in earnest but what advice would you give to people just starting out on their builds? What did you guys maybe get right and what do you ever get wrong? What would you tell yourself if you were starting over without any experience?
Boaz Ben Moshe 34:00
The people who regret too much, I would tell myself not to be worried too much a) regarding financial because obviously, paying for launch costs a lot of money. It should be upfront, it's something that universities or organizations are not too eager to pay, because its money getting out of the system. So, they don't want to pay a lot of salaries. But really, prior to working a satellite in space, there's a lot of steps you need and confidence. So, I would say try to build a small happy team. Not necessarily need to be people from NASA, it's not really rocket science using IoT from here and those Raspberry Pi from there and also look at the ingenuity, it's tons of open source there, it's all the sensors available. So, I would say, start as soon as possible and try to do something which is on a toy level, then iterate it and whenever you can convince your CEO or the financial guy about one launch. Then once you put the deadline in a year, or so, then be motivated. If you have a team, then the price of launch is supposed to drop but it's not really more than half a year labor.
So, it’s worse have trying to do that and embrace. Look at the spaceX people, they tried to do something with rockets, if it's working, they're happy. If it's blown on the ground, they're extremely happy and they stream it on YouTube. So, try to use it as a success and don’t worry too much about the the real science behind it, it will come. So, whenever you have a team with enthusiasm, the working, and you have people with some people on part time, and people full time and the atmosphere. It’s just like whenever you step nearby the ocean and you think, well, I need to swim, there's approach of trying to do that, and then there is one step after the other and you can’t just jump in! So, even if you fail as we did in subtle one, we couldn't receive any message from it, maybe because of a wrong opening over the antenna or elsewhere but I'm not regretting anything. Maybe I didn't do a lot of experiments but I think the only way to learn is to start walking and just start and then things will evolve.
Tom Walkinshaw 37:52
Just jump in, just go for it. Rony, would you say that you wish you'd known him before you started and what do you think you guys got right?
Rony Ronen 38:05
You know, I’m new to this, I’m only two years into the satellite project. My background was a software development manager on a telecommunication project - boring stuff. So, for me, it was an amazing change, enjoying every minute of it. I think as was mentioned that the iteration, keep doing it, iterate, do something, check for it to see if it's working, then you're building it again and again and then you are coming to something that's mature enough to send even to the space and for me, that experience is the learning for the new space. It was great things for me and I am enjoying it, that's it.
Tom Walkinshaw 39:26
Well, that's a good way to sum up, thank you guys for your time and being on the pocketqube podcast and we see in Glasgow for integration in the not too distant future and fingers crossed for your success. So, wishing you good luck, and just keep up the good work. Keep at it, and I'm sure you guys will get your beacons from space and looking forward to it, it should be awesome to experience.
Boaz Ben Moshe 39:58
Same here! I just want to say thank you on behalf of the real students who actually work in the other room here, and it's an amazing opportunity to take part in, play with things and then you send them to space. It's an amazing step and thank you for that.
Tom Walkinshaw 40:26
To be honest, I just got really passionate about it and it's really awesome that we can take a lot of people in and get their missions up, it's a really unique opportunity to be part of that and for me to help the teams. The mission of the company is to help enable that and we were fortunate in the last launch that we got them all up. This launch is going to be an even bigger one because there’s more people involved, there will be more customers and more teams and hopefully. I’m just a really big fan of all this myself, but then I realized that this could help so many other people and this is really awesome. We need to make this a thing you know and get people flying stuff.