17 Hyderabad students build payload for upcoming ISRO launch

A group of 17 students from Hyderabad, aged between 12 and 15 years, have come up with a flight- ready CubeSat payload, a product of their design and fabrication. This payload will be sent into space on an ISRO mission slated for January 12 at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC, SHAR), Sriharikota.

Giving their payload a very creative and cool name, the students of Blue Blocks Montessori School project this as SBB, 1 (Satellite Blue Blocks, 1), and it has been officially sanctioned by ISRO to be onboard its PSLV, C62 mission.

Indeed, the difference is stark when compared to the usual school level STEM projects. The students have, of course, been able to do everything from scratch, i.e., designing, assembling, and coding the CubeSat payload all by themselves. They used commercial off- the shelf sensors, carried out soldering of the components, and wrote firmware to transmit real time telemetry. Although a couple of scientists from Take Me 2 Space were around to provide the students with some guidance, the students did all the engineering work completely themselves.

"The hardest part was figuring out the sensors that wouldn't talk to each other, " said one of the students. "We didn't just want to go and watch the launch; we wanted to be part of the rocket."

The project was conducted at the Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute, guided by a framework "Structural Autonomy, " which supports problem, solving with very little adult supervision. Co-founder Pavan Goyal said, "They are not future engineers. They are flight-ready engineers today."

The initiative by Blue Blocks has received international recognition. The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo has invited co-founder Pavan Goyal to present the methodology, and the students will also deliver a technical review at the AMI Conference in Mexico.

About the PSLV-C62 Mission 

The PSLV-C62 mission will launch the EOS-N1 Earth observation satellite along with 15 co-passenger satellites from India and abroad. It will also demonstrate the Kestrel Initial Technology Demonstrator (KID), a small prototype re-entry vehicle developed by a Spanish startup.  

PSLV is ISRO's trusted workhorse rocket, having successfully completed 63 flights - including landmark missions such as Chandrayaan-1, Mars Orbiter Mission, Aditya-L1, and Astrosat - and holds the record for launching 104 satellites in a single mission in 2017.