UW A&A CubeSat Team

Check in here for team updates, milestones, announcements, and anything else we'd like to share.

June, 2021: At the end of the school year, we said goodbye to several subsystem leads that have had a huge impact on SOC-i. Thank you to Garrett Giddings, Amy Shyu, Billy Lin, Gorkem Caylak, James Rosenthal, and William Pope for all of their efforts! All of them are off to bigger and better things in the world and we're excited for them!

May, 2021: We had a successful three-day long review with external reviewers from the UW, industry, and partner universities. Thank you so much to everyone that gave their time to review our system design. We're excited to be pushing towards delivery for flight!

February, 2021: We're extremely excited to announce that AACT has accepted a launch with Firefly Aerospace on the VCLS Demo 2 mission! SOC-i's mission is now being tailored to a 550km Sun-synchronous orbit, slated to launch in early-to-mid 2022. Now the hard work really kicks in, time to deliver!

September, 2020: We've finished our first full-length conference paper. AACT will be sending students to present at the 2021 IEEE Aerospace conference (virtually) on the SOC-i spacecraft. More than 20 students contributed to writing the paper, and many more contributed to the work that it represents. Full citation/link below!

June, 2020: Even with a global pandemic forcing us out of our development labs, the work continues to try and push SOC-i closer to completion. Working entirely from home, we've maintained a steady pace on both the hardware and software fronts.

March, 2020: Our GNC leads Cole Morgan and Devan Tormey have accepted a full-time job offers to join SpaceX and Blue Origin respectively, both in the Seattle area. Our STC lead Arnela Grebovic has accepted a full-time job offer to join Blue Origin. Congrats to you three and thank you for all that you've done on the SOC-i mission!

February 21, 2020: Our launch application was selected by NASA as one of 18 CubeSats in the pool of applicants. Of the chosen 18, we were ranked 8th in the manifest list. At just over one year since the AACTs kick-off meeting, we are incredibly proud of the work our team has done to get to this point so quickly. Read more in the UW's press release.

November 4, 2019: We've submitted our launch application for the SOC-i mission! A 212 page document detailing every aspect of the spacecraft's design so far. Happy reading, NASA.

October, 2019: A group of faculty and industry professionals critiqued our design, and offered a ton of great feedback. A huge milestone for the team as we near the launch application.

February, 2019: We put together a team of faculty and industry professionals to assess our mission plan and help us shape the scope, ConOps and implementation plan for our first mission. Lots of work to do now to turn it into reality.

July, 2018: The idea for AACT was conceived in April, 2018. Many team names were bandied about over malted beverages, and a proposal for funding was eventually submitted to the College of Engineering using the Aeronautics & Astronautics CubeSat Team. In July, AACT's funding proposal was accepted by the College of Engineering. Houston, we have a space program. Fun fact: One of the co-founders was literally at the Johnson Space Center when he got the phone call.

• T. P. Reynolds, C. L. Kelly, C. Morgan, A. Grebovic, J. Erickson, H. Brown, W. C. Pope, J. Casamayor, K. Kearsley, G. Caylak, K. E. Fisher, C. Wutzke, K. Ashton, J. Rosenthal, D. Tormey, E. Freneau, G. Giddings, H. E. Horata, A. Dighde, S. Parakh, J. Zhen, J. C. Purpura, D. B. Pratt, and A. Hunt, “SOC-i: A CubeSat Demonstration of Optimization-Based Real-Time Constrained Attitude Control,” IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, 2020.

• S. Agarwal, J. Erickson, E. Freneau, A. Grebovic, C. Kelly, C. Morgan, T. P. Reynolds, D. Tormey, C. Wutzke and H. Yu, “ A CubeSat Flight Demonstration of Constrained Attitude Control, ” 34th Annual Small Satellite Conference, Virtual, 2020.

• T. P. Reynolds, K. Kaycee, B. Barzgaran, M. Hudoba de Badyn, S. Rice, E. Hansen, A. Adler, B. Acikmese and M. Mesbahi, “ Development of a Generic Guidance Navigation & Control System for Small Satellites: Application to HuskySat-1, ” AIAA Space Forum, Orlando, FL, 2018.