ESSENCE CubeSat Mission

From concept to orbit: Engineering a university student-led satellite mission.

It is a rare privilege to be part of a satellite mission from its initial whiteboard concepts all the way to a successful orbital launch. It is even rarer when that entire lifecycle is driven by a team of university students.

The ESSENCE CubeSat mission was exactly that: a fully student-led space project that demanded professional-grade engineering, rigorous testing, and uncompromising project management to design a working satellite and launch it into space within 2 years.

The Mission & The Challenge

ESSENCE was a 3U CubeSat planned to be in orbital operations for 2 years. While in orbit, it took images of ice melt in northern communities using an earth observation payload designed by Canadensys. It additionally had a secondary payload in the form of an ADCS experiment which tested a hybrid ADCS strategy of using reaction wheels and magnetorquers. It also tested space worthiness of off the shelf components such as a Raspberry Pi Zero and an Arduino Uno by using them in some satellite subsystems.

On the left, the ESSENCE Mission Overview Diagram. Middle, the ESSENCE satellite poses for a photo at the Canadian Space Agency. Right, the final ESSENCE - NanoRacks Integration Test, AKA "the fit test".
This image can also have a caption. It's like magic.

You can also put regular text between your rows of images, even citations (Einstein & Taub, 1950). Say you wanted to write a bit about your project before you posted the rest of the images. You describe how you toiled, sweated, bled for your project, and then… you reveal its glory in the next row of images.

You can also have artistically styled 2/3 + 1/3 images, like these.

The code is simple. Just wrap your images with <div class="col-sm"> and place them inside <div class="row"> (read more about the Bootstrap Grid system). To make images responsive, add img-fluid class to each; for rounded corners and shadows use rounded and z-depth-1 classes. Here’s the code for the last row of images above:

<div class="row justify-content-sm-center">
  <div class="col-sm-8 mt-3 mt-md-0">
    {% include figure.liquid path="assets/img/6.jpg" title="example image" class="img-fluid rounded z-depth-1" %}
  </div>
  <div class="col-sm-4 mt-3 mt-md-0">
    {% include figure.liquid path="assets/img/11.jpg" title="example image" class="img-fluid rounded z-depth-1" %}
  </div>
</div>