Flathead grad helped build satellite circling Earth

The third time proved a charm for putting Montana’s first satellite into orbit.

Adam Gunderson, a 2001 graduate of Flathead High School, watched from a NASA control room at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as the satellite was successfully launched in the early morning hours of Oct. 27.

“What goes on behind the scenes is pretty crazy,” Gunderson, 29, said of the time in the control room.

Gunderson, an electrical engineering major, is one of about 125 students at Montana State University who built the small satellite, initially dubbed Explorer-1 [Prime] in honor of the first U.S. satellite to reach space back in 1958.

On track to graduate in May, Gunderson said he joined the extracurricular satellite project mid-stride. Having spent six years in the Navy as an electronics technician before enrolling at Montana State, he used that background to help build the satellite’s radio and electronics.

He was selected to represent Montana State in the NASA control room during the launch.

“If they see a voltage they don’t like, if they see anything they don’t like, everyone starts talking and they pass it off to engineering teams standing by, and it all happens in minutes. It’s a lot busier than it looks,” he said.

Montana State students worked for five years in the school’s Space Science and Engineering Lab under Director Dave Klumpar to design, build and test the satellite. Its successful launch to orbit was a first for Montana State, and a first for the state.

An earlier attempt on a Russian-launched rocket in 2006 crashed and burned in Kazakhstan shortly after liftoff. A second try in March went down into the South Pacific near Antarctica after the rocket malfunctioned.

“Once you hand it off, it’s pretty much out of your hands,” Gunderson said of the two failed rocket launches and lost satellites.

Like its two predecessors, the cube-shaped Explorer-1 [Prime] weighs just 2.2 pounds and measures about 4 inches on each side.

Montana State utilized a NASA ride-sharing program for researchers and educators to put its first satellite in orbit.

Given the two launch failures, students held their cheers back in late October as their satellite streaked through the sky to the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere on board a 127-foot Delta II rocket that NASA launched shortly before 4 a.m. local time.

Two hours later, after a NASA climate satellite successfully deployed, Montana State’s satellite sprang from its small container on the rocket just as planned. That’s when the cheers broke out, and rightfully so.

The satellite is now orbiting Earth once every 90 minutes, following an elliptical trajectory that puts it anywhere from 283 to 503 miles above the planet’s surface.

It has since been renamed the William A. Hiscock Radiation Belt Explorer, in honor of the Montana Space Grant Consortium director and Montana State physics professor who died in 2009 and played an integral role in the satellite projects.

“About an hour ago we got our first uplink, so it’s up and fully functional. We sent it a command and it executed,” Gunderson said Wednesday afternoon.

“That was the last big milestone before we can start qualifying data and doing some science.”

The solar-powered satellite transmits a radio frequency “heartbeat” every 15 seconds to relay vital information like battery temperatures and voltages back down to Earth, Gunderson said.

Ham radio operators in France, England and the Netherlands reported picking that signal up about three hours after the launch.

Parts of the student-built satellite relied on ingenuity and some very down-to-earth components.

Those include an amplifier from an old cellular phone, a Stanley tape measure antenna and even a bit of 20-pound test fishing line that a timed heating element burned through to deploy the antenna once the satellite was in orbit, Gunderson said.

The satellite’s lightweight aluminum exterior was made here in Kalispell, by Sonju’s Machine Shop.

Instruments on board the satellite are designed to measure the intensity and variability of electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth, discovered by the Explorer-1 satellite back in 1958.

Constantly in flux, the radiation belts contain highly charged particles in Earth’s magnetic field that can damage spaceborne equipment and pose a danger to astronauts, making it important to understand their variability. The satellite transmits scientific data every 30 seconds, with Montana State students working in shifts to track and command the satellite.

Shortly after launch, the satellite passed through a band of intense electrons bombarding the Earth’s atmosphere over Alaska.

Highly charged particles from solar disturbances can upset the Van Allen radiation belts and trigger spectacular auroras as they make their way through Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere at the poles.

“[National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] has a few big satellites doing the same thing, but we get our measurements and relay them to see if they correlate and measure different areas to get more data,” Gunderson said of the project.

The Montana State satellite, one of several university satellites that went up on the NASA rocket, will orbit Earth for several years, slowly descending until it burns up in the atmosphere.

With one space mission now under his belt, Gunderson is already moving on to the next, as he tries to decide between going to graduate school or pursuing a career in the aerospace industry.

“We have a few more things coming up,” he said.

The next mission under way, Firebird, is a joint venture between Montana State University, the National Science Foundation, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of New Hampshire.

That mission will see the launch of two more satellites. Together, the satellites will try to measure mysterious electron microbursts that happen in Earth’s magnetic field.

“There are some theories on why they happen and what they do to the ionosphere, but no one is sure,” Gunderson said.

“We’re just starting to do all the little subsystems [for the satellites] and put them together. ... Hopefully we’ll launch later next year.”

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.