The Future Of

Binar-1 and Space Science

Episode Summary

Launched on 29 August, Curtin University’s Binar-1 CubeSat satellite will provide easy access to space for students, researchers and industry.

Episode Notes

Launched on 29 August, Curtin University’s Binar-1 CubeSat satellite will provide easy access to space for students, researchers and industry. 

Episode Transcription

Intro:

This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how they work is helping shape it for the better.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, ignition and liftoff. Cargo Dragon takes flight continuing a busy year of deliveries to a crew of seven aboard the International Space Station.

Jessica:

That was the sound of Western Australia's first homegrown satellite launching into space.

The Binar-1 CubeSat, or miniaturized satellite, was built by students and staff at Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre. It was on board a SpaceX rocket which launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida on the 29th of August 2021. 

In this episode of The Future Of I was joined by the Binar Space Program Project Manager Ben Hartig where we chatted ahead of the inaugural launch about the accessible technology Binar is built on, how it differs to other cube satellites and learnt more about the program that’s putting space in the hands of students.

If you’d like to learn more about Binar, you can visit binarspace.com.

Ben Hartig:

Yeah, so the Binar space... See look, now you got me doing it. The Binar Space Programme is a programme for students and researchers to build a spacecraft at Curtin that will help us explore the solar system. And it's named after the Noongar word for fireball. And also that comes from the desert fireball network where we actually started the research that, that project started this project as an extension of that.

Jessica:

And what's the Binar-1 satellite?

Ben Hartig:

Ah, yeah, the Binar-1 satellite is the first satellite that we'll be launching. So that's the satellite launching this weekend and it's a 1U Cubesat. So that's a 10 centimetre by 10 centimetre by 10 centimetre satellite, which is really small at half a loaf of bread. And we're going to space that with first Western Australia space craft and it will also be the first step for us towards building spacecraft for the moon.

Jessica:

Crazy to think that something so small is going to be doing so much. So, when you say it's 10 by 10 by 10 what's its weight? What does it, can you talk us through what it looks like?

Ben Hartig:

It looks like a cube, which has solar panels on the outside and when it's in space, it will deploy antennas, which are just essentially four bits of metal that stick out the side and it weighs 1.33 kilos. It's actually a tiny bit taller than 10 centimetres. So it's not exactly a cube but we won't go there. And yeah, that's about it. From the outside, it's really unassuming, now it's inside where it's packed full of electronics, that it's quite interesting, more for people that really love electronics than most people. If I think for most people, it looks like broke your phone open and that's what you're looking into.

Jessica:

Well, talking about the technology, what is the technology behind these satellites and how do they differ to other Cubesats? Because I understand Cubesats aren't essentially a new thing. How do they differ though? What's different about the Binar satellites that you're building?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah. Cubesats do you have a long history. So it's been about 20, 20 years now since the first Cubesat went up. It was originally started as an education programme. And as it's evolved, a lot of people have found ways to use it in industry. And in the early days they were really student hack jobs. And there was a really large failure rate and so we've seen people move more and more towards buying proven systems from companies. But those systems are actually really expensive, not in terms of space but in terms of a research programme and also in terms of accessibility for a large number of startups and research groups. And so what we've done is we've taken our take on that by building a single board, rather than having a whole bunch of subsystems.

Typically people stack multiple subsystems together and they will buy either from one vendor or many vendors, all the different subsystems and they'll put them together and that's called integration and that's where a lot of things tend to go wrong. So what we've done is we've put that into a board, single board where the computer gets done, all the integration where everything's digital and machines put it together. So that means that there's a really low risk in terms of number of errors in assembling it. And it also means that we take up a lot less space with the core systems, which means more space for the fun stuff. So things like cameras. So Binar-1 has cameras to look at stars and also to take some low res but interesting pictures of WA and that's mainly a testing the sensors to see how they perform in space with future applications in mind. Yeah.

Jessica:

And so in terms of you talking about you building it in house and is that the real differentiator here that what you're doing here at Curtin in the Binar Space Programme is that you're taking off shelf products and building something that's going into space.

Ben Hartig:

I think, so I think there's this idea of consumer off the shelf, which you hear a lot about in Cubesats and it has levels of meaning. So some people say consumer off the shelf and what they mean is, ready to go into space. Other people mean using integrated chips and things like that, that would be used in consumer products and that are commercially available. And so we use the chips, so we go down to the basic level of designing our circuitry for printed circuit boards.

It would be amazing if we could see people in Australia actually going beyond that and looking at the chip level and working on Silicon wafers but we're not there yet. And really what that means is that we can use the commodity manufacturing techniques that mobile phone providers use and we can order in batch. So that means if we want a lot, we can get them actually cheaper per unit than if we build one or two. But it also means that because they're cheaper, we can actually do that, we can buy a bunch of them, destroy them in the lab and learn a lot more about them. And I think it's that experience in the lab that a lot of other groups are missing out on and for a university, I think that's really important but also for researchers, that's really important because when you've put all your work into a really interesting instrument to use in your spacecraft, the step then to understand the system that you're integrating it with is huge and could often lead to some real challenges.

But if you've got the system and you know it and you understand it and you have complete control of what's inside it, until you can change any piece of the software, you're not relying on, we call it black box software, where you have no idea what was happening in it. And you just put some data and you get some data out or functions in functions out. In this case, you have the full view of what's going on and you can make sure that everything works together. You can also then test it in the lab until you're satisfied that it's going to cope in space, which I think when you've spent such a large amount of money, which is for a university group might be your one and only satellite. You really, you can tend to be quite afraid of destroying that thing and damaging it.

And so by making it ourselves, we can actually really push things to the limit. We've got a whole pile of prototypes that we've killed and we've learned a lot in that process. And we can really get to learn a lot more by having that affordability in the programme. And that means that we can look to building a large number of satellites. And it also means we can afford to say, "Hey, we've got this board. We can have a school build a payload for it and they can test it on the real hardware." And that's what we're doing with Binar-X. We've got high schools involved and we're looking to get high schools coming up with concepts for space missions of their own. And this is something that's not that unique in the world at large, like in America, NASA have had primary schools put payloads into studies. And I think that's something we're lagging a lot in Australia in. And I think it's all of our responsibility to try and engage the next generation because they're really the future of space, not us.

Jessica:

In terms of, you've mentioned that affordability is what makes this programme different in that you can build them cheaply and build a lot of them. What does that also mean for what you're going to be able to do with them in space?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah. So another advantage of being able to build affordable spacecraft is that you can take risks that very expensive spacecraft can't take. So if you think about all of the NASA missions that go to the moon and they put in a large, large sums of money.

Jessica:

How much are we talking?

Ben Hartig:

I don't know exact numbers but I know it's can run into billions. And it depends also if you consider the massive ground effort of supporting those missions. So they're really big endeavours. And when you've done something that big and you have that many people depending on you for their livelihood, as well as the value of getting the data back, you can't take huge risks. So flying really low for example, towards the moon would be considered a big risk. I mean that's something we're hoping to do with our Binar Prospector mission and because we can make affordable spacecraft we can afford to take the risks that it won't go well and that we will lose those spacecraft and not get the data but the high risk, high reward means that we can get closer and have a chance of getting really high resolution data that can answer some of the really big questions about the nature of the moon and what we can do there when we look to set up permanent human existence there.

Jessica:

That is very futuristic

Ben Hartig:

It's very futuristic and it's futuristic but it's been in our collective conscious since well, 50 years or more, in the Apollo era. And it's been like a question of why haven't we done this, more than is it possible? And so I think that now we're really starting to push that boundary in trying to see how we can get people up there to stay. That's the ultimate goal that NASA's set. And I think it's a really good challenge for humanity. I think we get a little bit lost without challenges and I think having challenges for humanity, give us something to focus on that's positive and would make everyone find the best in themselves I guess, if you want to say.

Jessica:

I love that. You talked about Binar Prospector and the moon mission, what is that? What's future goal for that mission?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah, so I actually, I am an engineer but I work with an amazing team of planetary scientists who focus on geology and other sorts of more to do with the actual rocks that are on different bodies. And they've got some really amazing theories on the moon, on what we might not understand about where water deposits could be or things we're not a hundred percent sure on, that need clarification before we can say with confidence that there's water elsewhere on the moon that's usable. So at the moment everyone's focused on the poles and the poles are looking like really good locations for water but they're not really good locations for technology. Its very close to a zero Kelvin.

And I don't know exactly how close off the top of my head but I know it's far colder than anywhere we've ever built equipment for and that means you can't use any fluids that we would typically use in any of the systems until you have to start looking at alternatives. This really means you have to depend on nuclear power, which adds risk. And so, especially with humans involved, having a robotic mission on nuclear, that one thing but having humans working with a robot that's powered by nuclear is not as comfortable. So looking for other alternatives. And the only way to really do that is to get more data at this point.

Jessica:

Data will inform it.

Ben Hartig:

That's right.

Jessica:

Yeah. And how will the Binar programme change access to space in the future?

Ben Hartig:

So I think the first thing is that, I think there's a lot of amazing groups specifically in Australia but elsewhere as well, where they have the ideas and could produce some amazing missions but they don't have the technology or the budget to start down the path. And so I think for us to be able to work with other universities and give them a leg up is a really big thing that's going to change. And like I mentioned before, also with schools, I'd like to see Australians having that same advantage or opportunity that the students in the US have where they get to university and they go, "Oh, the Cubesat programme. I did that in high school." And so then they can really start thinking about the big challenges.

So I think that's the main thing I think and I think I hope that we will continue to push the boundary on how small we can make spacecraft. I think people have gotten comfortable with small and they're starting to look big but for some of our specific goals in terms of planetary science and looking at all of the unexplored bodies of the solar system, I mean, there's tens of thousands of asteroids around. And some of those could be the asteroid that does the next awkward death of the dinosaur style plunge into our atmosphere.

So understanding our solar system's really important for so many reasons. And there's so many of those we can't afford to send big spacecraft to all of them. The logistics of sending one spacecraft to many of them is a different sort of challenge but being able to make cheap interplanetary spacecraft and send them off to at least capture images of all of these things and actually have an idea of what they're made of and how big they are, I think that's the next important thing for us and what we hope to achieve in the long term.

Jessica:

Obviously space missions aren't cheap. We've talked about that but obviously what you're producing in the Binar programme, the satellites are affordable but how does said satellite get into space? How does that happen?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah. So at the moment we're working with a great group from Japan called Space BD and they're opening up JAXAs infrastructure for commercial use. And so we were actually working through them at the moment to use the International Space Station. And so basically a rocket takes up the supplies and in those supplies, things like water, food recently, I've heard underpants.

Jessica:

Astronauts need all those things too.

Ben Hartig:

And also satellites and experiments go up. So some of the experiments that will be conducted in the International Space Station but some of them get put out through the airlock and that's the case with Binar-1 and the next two launches, which will have a total of seven satellites in them. We'll see them all going up through the International Space Station and out the airlock. And that's really good when you're starting off because you get a really predictable orbit.

There's other options out there. So I hope everyone knows about Rocket Lab and the amazing work they're doing. They do a lot of Cubesat, launches as well. And there's other groups as well. There's Gilmour Space in Australia that's looking to do similar launches from Australia, which will be really exciting when we have launched from Australia again because we had launches in the, I think, yeah, the late fifties. So right at the beginning of the space race, we had launches from Australia and now we're going to have them again. And Southern Launch have already started launching things from, sub orbitally from South Australia. So it's a really exciting time and there's lots of ways to get stuff into space. And the more ways there are to get stuff in space, the more affordable that segment of space gets. So we need to bring the cost of the actual spacecraft down so that universities can leverage those opportunities.

Jessica:

You mentioned there's future satellites as part of this programme. Can you talk a little bit about what that's looking like in the next small, in the future if you want that?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah so, as I mentioned, this is a first step towards interplanetary or to begin with lunar spacecraft and we're really taking an approach where what we want to do is we want to get up and learn all the lessons that we can as quickly as possible. We have a whole bunch of space environment systems in our labs. So we have liquid nitrogen system that lets us do your cryo environment in a vacuum chamber and then heat it up and treat it like the vacuum of space with the thermal cycling, we call that TVAC or thermal vacuum, really exciting names. We also have the vibration table that simulates the shaking of the launch. And we've got a bunch of ways to simulate the solar on the panels and different things like that. And all of those things are great but they don't add up to space.

There they're little bits here and there and you can't get them all together and they're not a perfect analogue. And so you never really know, no matter how long you test in the lab, what things are going to happen in space. And so the only way to really be sure is to go there. And so the first one, hopefully we will get so many lessons from that, that the next one will be even better and the next one and the next one and each time we add in more technology that will help with the moon. So the next one we're looking at radiation hardening systems and also reaction wheels. So that's a wheel that uses the momentum of a spinning disc to control where your satellite points and the star tracking is going to evolve from the first camera that we're using to a more capable system with onboard calculations.

And then following that, we're looking at deployable systems. And so all these little steps head towards building a capable spacecraft and we'll test the instruments that we're developing in stages along the way. And so the idea is not to try and build the whole spacecraft, sent it up and then not know what happened but to test controllable amounts each time so that you know, okay, well, it was probably my power system. If something went completely wrong, we know we need to look at that and we're not looking at all these other extra systems, like complex instruments as a source of failure. So we want to limit the sources of failure for each test into space. And so that's really why we've got a series of launches but it's also why we've chosen one new. It it's enough to test those step-by-steps. And once we're satisfied, we'll move to bigger spacecraft but hopefully we will continue to condense the core so that we have more spacecraft for instruments.

Jessica:

So essentially it's like a test run. These satellites you're testing all the different components to one day go to the moon and to get the data that you need to do it.

Ben Hartig:

Yeah. And also to train the people because it's been pointed out to me a lot of times that, "Oh, but there's lots of universities around the world that do it." But it's still, that's not accessible for Australians. It wasn't that accessible prior to COVID, it's really not accessible now. And so we need to be able to give Australians opportunities to work on real spacecraft so that they get real experience that then can be applied in the Australian space industry. And I think that universities have a big part to play in that because they don't have the same commercial demands that our company may has.

And we have what would you call it? We have a motive or a call to action to lead the way into the future. So I think that it's a important thing for Australian universities to pick up that mantle and really guide the next generation into getting the experience needed. And so as part of that Curtin's building some courses to open up experience in terms of this sort of stuff and using the lessons and experience we're gaining and the hardware we're developing in our group to really test, not to test, to give students the opportunity to test the things they're learning on real hardware.

Jessica:

You really, in a sense, putting space in the hands of students, really, whether they're university students, tertiary students as well.

Ben Hartig:

Yeah, that's definitely the goal. A big goal of this is to enable students to get the experience. We have research goals as well as a planetary science group. And so those are really important to us but we're choosing to do everything in a way that maximises the benefit for our community as well.

Jessica:

That's great. And just we've touched on it slightly but once Binar-1 is in orbit, shot out of the International Space Station. What's its purpose? It makes contact with us with earth and who have you got assisting in that process?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah. So we actually have, we have a whole bunch of people. We've got a lot of support and that's really great. We have access to ESA's SMILE facility in Darmstadt in Germany. And ESA has been a big supporter from the very beginning of this. We're also working with two groups in Perth, the Rose and Fugro who have focused on remote operations. And so we're working with them to develop systems that allow us to operate in space. We're looking also to the future of robotics in space and how we can manage those in a generic way, thinking more like how we manage robots in the Pilbara than how we typically manage robots on another planet. And so taking all of that experience that we've gained in Western Australia doing mining and applying that to the space environment. So that's a really exciting industry engagement that this project has.

Jessica:

A lot of crossover, right?

Ben Hartig:

Yeah, a lot of crossover and a really good opportunity, I think for the students as well. We talk a lot about industry ready graduates and having them so involved in this research programme and all the opportunities for students. It just becomes like a really natural pool of mixing talent with industry and getting everyone exposure to how people do it in those different areas. So it's a really nice place to work and really nice opportunity to work on.

Jessica:

Space missions sound really hard. So, I've heard about how launches can be rescheduled for a number of reasons. And within 10 seconds of it meant to be launching. Why is that the case?

Ben Hartig:

Launching a rocket is quite dangerous. And especially some of the places that we launched from in the world, there's actually a lot of people living nearby. And so you have to take the slightest risk into account. And so if there's even someone's crossed into your airspace within the time or the weather is not quite right or something doesn't add up-

Jessica:

I've even heard birds.

Ben Hartig:

Birds, birds can do it, yeah. Or even someone else's operation in space can completely change the schedule. So things aren't working in other spacecrafts that are going to be in the path, those things can delay space. And I think that's another great point too why Australia's really interesting because we've got a whole lot of place where there's not a lot of people. And so places like Whalers Way where some launch, they're launching from. There's a lot less likelihood that you'd be delayed. But at the moment, the major launch pads are in places like Florida, where we're launching from in Cape Canaveral, where you have a lot of commercial airspace around and a lot of people living. So you have to be extra careful that you don't do anything that could put those people at risk.

Jessica:

What inspired you to work in this space? Pardon the pun there.

Ben Hartig:

Well, it was actually my granddad that inspired me first into engineering. And I only just recently found out that some of the work he did as a draughtsman was on the Blue Streak rocket, which launched from Australia. So finding that connection out after I was already involved was really a nice tie-back. But I think for me, it's always just been a fascination with technology. I really like pulling things apart and understanding how they work. And I like challenges. I like things where people aren't really sure what's going on and space is definitely that, it's the final frontier. And so that makes it exciting. It makes it a really interesting and appealing thing to work on because you don't know and there's a bit of excitement in that.

And also it means there's a good chance we'll find out stuff we don't even know we're looking for yet. So I think that's the real game changers for humanity are things that we don't expect to find out. And if you look at the history of space, it's just, we've only known about it for a really short period of time in humanity. So for so long, we just looked at the stars and thought they were hung up in the sky and they were very close. And it's just an exciting, I think a really exciting thing. But yeah, in Australia, when I, at least when I was growing up and I hope it's getting less and less true, space seem very much like some something you had to go overseas to do. And that wasn't really ever in my goal list.

I love Australia, I love being here. It's a beautiful place to live. I like surfing, I like diving. I don't want to go somewhere where that's not an option. I need to be near the ocean. So I think that, that might be a real barrier for some people, some people just because they don't want to, other people because it's just not an option for them and they don't have the supports they need to get there. And I think, yeah, I think I was lucky. I took some winding paths and ended up here and it just kept picking up all the interesting things that came in front of me. And yeah. So I don't know if that answers the question, but-

Jessica:

Absolutely does. It's a really, really lovely story. It's really nice. Thank you so much for coming in and speaking with us today Ben, really appreciate it. I know you got a lot on your plate with the launch of this satellite very, very close. But good luck with it all and the programme in general.

Ben Hartig:

Thank you.

Jessica:

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