Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

10-25-2025

Abstract

Taylor University Computer Science & Engineering, in collaboration with NearSpace Education, is initiating a broad-participation, multi-year effort to enhance space-awareness and offer students career-impacting opportunities to build and fly satellites that have a LEGO®-robotics-based payload.

We built a prototype "flat sat" to test and demonstrate our LEGO satellite concept. The satellite uses NearSpace Launch’s Dream Big 1/2U bus to manage power, radio communications, and any other non-payload activity such as attitude control. Using the Dream Big bus makes building the satellite technically and financially feasible for a small team without significant satellite experience.

The payload consists of the LEGO robotics Spike Prime and LEGO EV3 control boards jointly managing a set of sensors. We have three categories of sensors: actual LEGO sensors, 3rd party sensors build to work with LEGO robotics, and sensors that are not designed to work with LEGO. Some sensors are connected to the Spike Prime, and some to the EV3. The Spike Prime controls payload operations, such as collecting data from sensors connected to the SPIKE Prime, requesting sensor data from the EV3, collating the data into a packet, and handing the packet to the flight radio for transmission to Earth via the Iridium satellite network.

Back on earth, we receive the packets, storing and processing them. Finally, we can automatically post mission information – including sensor data charts – to X (Twitter) and plan to post to other social media platforms. We can make satellite orbit tracking Internet-available using a 3-D model of the Earth. We plot the packet transmission locations and display the contents for each received packet.

A successful full-path test from the flat sat — through the Iridium network and back down to earth — took place at NearSpace Education took place on Thursday, July 17.

Conference site: https://www.smallsateducation.org/

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