- The TEIDESAT project will establish optical communication with Earth and will be the first of its type undertaken at a Canary Island university
This device is based on the standard CubeSat of the University of Stanford—small satellites that can fit in the palm of your hand, are shaped into a cube, and measure 10 x 10 x 10 cm—and could be operational by 2023. It will establish optical communication with space through extremely high power LEDs that will admit pulses of light that the nanosatellite will use to send encrypted messages through the atmosphere to the Earth station located on the Canary Islands where there will be a robotic telescope that the team will build next school year.
TEIDESAT began at the University of La Laguna and has a multidisciplinary team of 25 students mostly comprising engineers, physicists, designers, economists, and journalists from the university on Tenerife. It does, however, also include some students from the universities of Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona, and Milan. Additionally, there is a team of students at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
In this regard, the Cepsa director on the Canary Islands and representative of Fundación Cepsa on the islands, José Manuel Fernández-Sabugo, underlined that the project itself is “a collector of university talent” and emphasized “the challenge and difficulty that comes with not only designing it, but also ensuring it operates, survives in space, and has a practical use.” Fernández-Sabugo also stressed that the educational work done by the members of the TEIDESAT team is “outstanding inspiration” for high school students. “For the Fundación Cepsa, it is a point of pride to work with the first satellite that will be designed, built, and launched into orbit by Canarian university students,” he asserted.
In addition to what this scientific-tech milestone will mean for Canarian universities, this initiative also has an academic objective, as it allows its members with multidisciplinary educational backgrounds to not only apply the knowledge attained in their respective disciplines, but also find synergies between them, while learning about fields associated with space
that are unrelated to their studies. All of this will help them to become more complete and versatile professionals.
In addition, TEIDESAT has a scientific-tech educational goal for people of all ages, with a particular emphasis on children and teenagers. That is why the team is systematically attending numerous scientific events and conferences on the islands and away from them that are focused on promoting the importance of critical thinking, the scientific method, and teamwork.
Its coordinator, the ULL’s industrial technical engineer, Joshua Barrios Pérez, who is currently in the ULL’s astrophysics Master’s program, emphasized that undertaking the project of launching something built by themselves into space is challenging him and the rest of the team. “It is a vital, priceless experience and an extremely powerful driver of inspiration to undertake future projects,” he stated.
In the project’s final phase, the nanosatellite will be launched to LEO (low Earth orbit), at an altitude of about 400 km, and will have a working life of approximately nine months. During this time, data will be collected that will be used to study the impact of bright satellites, particularly mega-constellations like Starlink, on the observation conducted at Canary Island observatories and the ability to detect objects that are potentially dangerous to the Earth, primarily asteroids.
The collaboration with TEIDESAT is one of more than 15 initiatives that the Fundación Cepsa Chair of the University of La Laguna is planning to carry out over the year, including master classes, conferences, awards to the best undergraduate and graduate capstone projects, and other activities including research, innovation, education, and dissemination.