Meet the REXUS team: Aether

“The REXUS/BEXUS campaign is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us young space engineers to see the ins-and-outs of a space project’s life cycle” Aether team

Aether: T-ReX investigates the feasibility of a small, flexible, and cost-effective re-entry CubeSat platform that can enable the safe, targeted, and monitored return of scientific payloads from Earth orbit. By relying on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, the platform aims to significantly lower the barrier to access for research fields such as space life sciences, material science, pharmacology, radiation hardening, and re-entry research.

This is becoming an increasingly important topic as opportunities to perform space-based experiments with sample return are currently scarce, costly, and largely limited to the International Space Station (ISS), whose available research capacity is constrained and nearing the end of its operational lifetime.

Aether experiment

The experiment consists of a Free-Fall Unit (FFU), which is a full-scale 3-unit CubeSat. The FFU is stored within the nose cone of the REXUS 37 rocket and is ejected using a custom ejection system near its apogee. Fifteen seconds after ejection, cool gas generators (CGGs) inflate a torus, causing the flexible Thermal Protection System (fTPS) to be unfolded and act as a functional heat shield.

The FFU features two communication systems. The direct communication system features a deployable turnstile antenna used for downlink communication and for transmitting telemetry and measurement data to a ground station during the flight. The ground station consists of a Yagi antenna that will be pointed to the expected position of the FFU. All the measurement data and telemetry will be backed up on an SD card. The FFU is  equipped with a parachute to increase the likelihood of retrieval.

The second communication system  uses the Iridium satellite network. It is used to transmit mission-critical Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) coordinates.

The FFU is also equipped with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and the inflatable fTPS is fitted with temperature sensors.

Two cameras on opposite sides of the FFU are placed on the rearmost CubeSat unit, with a view of the inflatable fTPS. A high-quality, high-resolution video stream will be stored on separate SD cards on the FFU, while a fixed-bandwidth, low-resolution video stream or images will be transmitted over the ultra-high-frequency communication (UHFCOM) system.

Aether team

Aether team consists of eight full-time members, who have obtained a Master degree in: Electronics & ICT Engineering, Business Engineering, Astronomy & Astrophysics from the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium.

The team is supported by two PhD students and two professors associated with the university.

Aether in a nutshell

Experiment	Aether: T-ReX
Objective	Design, build and launch a CubeSat that can survive the harsh conditions of atmospheric re-entry
University - Country	Catholic University Leuven (KU Leuven) - Belgium
Website	Aether website
Social media	Aether on LinkedIn Aether on Instagram Aether on Facebook Aether on TikTok