A childhood fascination with space and satellites has driven Kurapati Sai Divya to design and develop a 1U Cubesat — a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. The CubeSat LakshyaSAT was successfully launched into the stratosphere from the United Kingdom in March this year.
Sai Divya is a research scholar in Satellite Communications and hails from Tenali. An engineering graduate in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Bapatla Engineering College, Sai Divya completed her M.Tech from KL University specialising in Communication and Radar Systems. She later enrolled in a Ph.D programme in Satellite Communications. It was during a presentation by a US-based professor at a workshop on Cubesat, that she was inspired to build a satellite of her own.
“The COVID-19 lockdown gave me all the time to pursue my dream and the research took one year. In 2021, I started developing the prototype and all the subsystems such as payload, computing, power, and data logging were designed and built,” Ms. Sai Divya said.
“After deciding that my core interest lies in satellite technology, I started going through research papers for a year. It took eight months to make the initial version and one more month to make the final prototype. I sent the prototype to the UK and B2Space company launched the satellite on March 15, 2022,” said Ms. Sai Divya.
The CubeSat model, placed inside a space box platform. was sent to the stratosphere to collect various parameters of the stratosphere with the help of a high altitude balloon. The payload LakshyaSAT reached an altitude of 26 km and stayed in the stratosphere for around three hours. It was a single-woman mission and the flight certificate from B2Space has certified that stratospheric flight with 1U CubeSat has been performed on March 15, 3:29 UK time, and reached a maximum altitude of 26.056.76 m.
“CubeSats have sensors which can measure temperature, pressure, humidity, altitude , CO2, magnetic strength and collect flight data. The data from the CubeSat can be used to compare with existing data sets, validate data with existing data and measure the accuracy of the components,” said Ms. Sai Divya, whose startup N Space Tech aims to make small and microsatellites more affordable and accessible in India.
