Space science and engineering education at Nanyang Technological University through the SCOOBI mission

The Satellite Research Centre (SaRC) at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has rapidly made strides in space technologies with 9 satellite developed and in operation since 2011. SaRC has initiated an educational program called ‘NTU Student Satellite Series’ (S³) to enable satellite building capabilities and space science and engineering education in Singapore. Under this student-run program, S³-I or SCOOBI is the first 3U Nanosatellite being built by a group of high school, undergraduate, graduate, and research scholars. The main mission objective of SCOOBI is to provide hands-on experience in satellite development and technology. As part of space science education in Singapore, SCOOBI is being designed to measure solar irradiance in Visible, Near Infra-Red (NIR) and Ultra Violet (UV) range using multispectral sensors along with a commercial off the shelf (COTS) camera for imaging purpose. Another payload is an IoT receiver to demonstrate the technology to receive and forward data from remote terrestrial IoT terminals. SCOOBI also demonstrates passive magnetic attitude control (PMAC) using permanent magnets. This paper explains how a tiered educational system incorporating students at multiple levels is being structured into a program to create a workforce for the emerging ‘Newspace’ industry. A secondary benefit of the program is the indigenous development of cubesat subsystems. SCOOBI is scheduled for launch to a 550km circular orbit with a 5 degree inclination in Q4 of 2020.