SUMBANDILA WILL SOON EXPLORE SOUTH AFRICA 

After internal political turmoil in Russia and intervention by high ranking South African Officials calling on the bilateral science agreement between the Russia and South Africa, a definite launch has been now been  secured for South Africa’s second satellite, SumbandilaSat. The satellite is already in Moscow and on its way to Baikonur where it will be launched on its journey around the earth on a Soyuz rocket.

The current launch window is around 21 August but those in the know say that it could be a few weeks later. It all hangs on the Metor-M mission which seems to have been responsible for the delays up to now.

 SUNSAT

South Africa’s first entry into space was in 1999 when SunSat, a small satellite built by the by students and lecturers at Stellenbosch University  (SUI) was launched. The project lead to the formation of SunSpace, a company that continued to build on the expertise gained during the development of SunSat.  

SumbandilaSat is sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology and was built at SunSpace in cooperation with the SU.

The main payload of SumbandilaSat is a Multi-spectral imager which has a 6.25m Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) with 6 spectral bands and is supported by an on-board storage of 24 Giga byte of memory and a main downlink of 72 Mb/s

The satellite also includes a number of experimental payloads which are part of a capacity and expertise building initiative associated with the project.

Stellenbosch University
Architectural radiation experiment for commercial off the shelf devices  (ARECOTS) and a software defined radio project

Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
A forced vibrating string experiment  

University of KwaZulu-Natal
Very low frequency (VLF) radio experiment

SA AMSAT
2m/70cm amateur radio transponder and digitalker. This payload will find not only use by the amateur radio fraternity but also has a large educational aspect of bringing space science into the class room.

A violin in orbit? 
Mark Gordon, until recently a student in the Department of Megatronics at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth has devised an experiment that will test the behaviour of a string in space.  

Mark responded to an advertisement in a Sunday Paper inviting students and researchers to apply to have their experiment included in the payload. The experiment is the first micro gravity experiment on a SA satellite. 

“My research is on string vibration”, Mark said. “I am comparing vibration of a string in microgravity to line vibration of overhead telecommunication and power systems.  In space we can measure the true vibration without having the dampening effect of air around it as we experience on the ground. The information will be useful in our study of overhead line behaviour and how to shorten spans. 

The SU engineers devised a unique way of measuring the vibration of the string in all directions as well as the lengthening of the string. They called it their “violin project”!

CONNECTING CLINICS IN DEEP RURAL AREAS

An interesting communications system commissioned by the Department of Communications (DOC) will bring data communications to the remotest parts of South Africa.  

The Department of Communication worked with the SU to develop a data store and forward system that is able to serve as a test bed for a future satellite network that can, amongst others, assist rural clinics with patient records, provide water affairs with reliable dam capacity records and associated weather conditions, provide email facilities at remote schools and assist other government departments to communicate with outlying posts. 

Sunspace has provided the required transceiver facilities and onboard computer hardware as well assuming the overall responsibility for the integration into the satellite while the University has been responsible for the ground station development as well as the onboard computer application software and hardware associated with the communications payload.

The mission is essentially a low-bandwidth data communications system that is accessible from areas in South Africa where there is no communication connectivity of any sort. The system is able to exchange short messages up to 8 k byte and can handle up to 20 ground station nodes with one channel.

STUDY OF VLF WAVES
The study of VLF waves is a project initiated by the department of physics at the University of KwaZulu- Natal.  The objective of the experiment is to study the transmission of VLF waves through the Ionosphere, the propagation between Hemispheres and the wave content of the magnetosphere. The Geospace Physics Group also operate radio and particle experiments in Antarctica and on Marion Island