DISCO-2 is not your typical student CubeSat: It is jam-packed with equipment and has an ambitious scientific goal of monitoring northeast Greenland.
The DISCO-program has led to the creation of five startup companies.
Students participating in DISCO had an easier time getting their dream job than their peers.
When Cecilie Strømsnes applied to become a member of the Danish Student Cubesat Program, also known as DISCO, she had not expected to become a team leader for the DISCO-2 mission.
“I applied, writing that I have a professional background in physics. But I also wrote in my application that I had been a manager at McDonalds. So they offered me a leadership role. They had expected 10–15 new students, but around 70 ended up applying. So they said that if they were going to take in that many students, there needed to be someone who could take responsibility for them.”
Cecilie is a on her ninth semester as a student at Aarhus University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. She is currently writing her master’s thesis and she’s working on a startup company with some of her fellow students. In her spare time, she rides motorbikes and is active in the Danish Home Guard (Hjemmeværnet) as part of an infantry company.
The leader and founder of the DISCO program, associate professor Christoffer Karoff, tells Danish Space News that he is convinced Cecilie will “become one of the future leaders in the Danish space sector.”
From manager at McDonalds to leading a mission to space. (Credit: Cecilie Strømsnes and Morten Irgens-Møller Nielsen)
Creating 3D maps of glaciers aided by on-orbit machine learning
Right now, however, it is her job as team leader for DISCO-2 that takes up most of Cecilie’s time. Apart from giving students hands-on experience with planning, building and operating a space mission, the goal of DISCO-2 is to study the interactions between glaciers and fjord systems in northeast Greenland.
The satellite will take several pictures of specific areas of interest at varying angles. This will allow the students to create 3D maps of the areas with a technique called “photogrammetry”. In addition, a thermal camera on DISCO-2 will reveal the temperatures of the water flowing from the glaciers into the fjords.
Another goal is to utilize machine learning while on orbit. The on-board computer will analyze images and, for example, discard those with too many clouds in them. This allows DISCO-2 to only transmit the images that match the criteria for the team down on Earth, which is particularly helpful, given the relatively low data-rate of the satellite and limited downlink opportunities.
DISCO-2 fact sheet
Form factor: 3U+ CubeSat - 10 x 10 x 37.65 centimeters
Funding: 400,000 EUR from the participating universities - Aarhus University, University of Southern Denmark and IT University of Copenhagen - as well as The Danish Industry Foundation (Industriens Fond) and Thomas B. Thrige Foundation.
Scientific payload: Two optical cameras (one high resolution, one wide-field) and a thermal camera.
Figure showing DISCO-2 in “flight mode” with fine sun sensors, solar panels and UHF antennas deployed.
“It is very atypical for student missions to have such a big scientific objective. Typically, you launch with just the hope that it works: That you can take a picture, but you don’t really care about the direction in which you take it. But with DISCO-2, we have many requirements. It needs to take images at specific angles in order to enable 3D images. The three cameras must work together. The computer should preferably be able to filter out images if there are a lot of clouds in the picture.”
Danish satellite manufacturer, Space Inventor, provided the parts for the satellite bus, and Cecilie points out that the employees there often comment on how “compact” DISCO-2 is compared to other student satellites that typically have empty spaces within them.
“They have mentioned several times that this is the first time they have held a satellite in their hands where you can’t see through it from the side. Typically, there are some holes and cavities – there aren’t any in ours. It’s packed with everything it can hold. So it’s a very ambitious project.”
In the beginning of December, Cecilie and her teammates will travel to Berlin to hand over DISCO-2 to the launch services company Exolaunch.
Weekend hackathon turned into pesticide monitoring startup
The DISCO program was initiated in 2020 by Aarhus University, University of Southern Denmark and IT University of Copenhagen. DISCO-1 launched in 2023. Back then, around ten students worked on the project. Now, about 150 students are involved with DISCO-2.
While the program aims to allow students to get hands-on experience with space missions, it is also an attempt at securing a steady pipeline of startups to the Danish ESA Business Incubation Centre. Cecilie points to the following list of startups that have either originated within the DISCO program or are affiliated with it:
Danish Graphene
Qase Tech
GreenGuard Automation
Scurid
HAB-COM
DISCOntaminate
Astro Drop
Wind Seeakers
Cecilie is herself currently involved with the startup DISCOntaminate.
“We are a bunch from DISCO who participated in a CASSINI hackathon, mostly for fun, because we had never tried it before. It was a weekend hackathon, where on Friday we sat with a glass of wine and thought, we’re just going to have a fun weekend and by Sunday we ended up winning the competition.”
Starting by working with government agencies and then moving on to a B2B yearly subscription model, DISCOntaminate aims to monitor illegal uses of pesticides in agriculture by leveraging existing Copernicus data and machine learning and thus alleviate the problem of contaminated ground water.
DISCOntaminate recently became part of The Kitchen, Aarhus University’s biggest startup hub that help students and researchers build their startups. Below you can see Cecilie pitch DISCOntaminate during the CASSINI Hackathon.
Not only has DISCO led to the creation of several startups. Cecilie also points out that students participating in DISCO have experienced a boost in terms of their career prospects.
“The people I know who worked on DISCO-1 have mentioned that they got jobs much faster than their friends did. Many of their peers applied for both their dream jobs and the typical bank or tech jobs that physicists often end up in. But the DISCO-1 students didn’t really do that. They applied for their dream job and got it relatively quickly.”
Course correction due to ESA summer school
Cecilie explains that she chose to study physics because she found space, stars and the natural world endlessly fascinating. Her parents’ careers were in completely different fields, and though they were always supportive and encouraged her curiosity, she often explored these questions on her own, driven by genuine interest.
When she started her bachelor’s degree at Aarhus University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, she imagined herself becoming a theoretical cosmologist - spending her days working with equations on a blackboard and exploring the universe through mathematical models.
A stay at an ESA summer school two years ago changed those plans.
“When I was at ESA, everything we did was wild. It was just as interesting and just as exciting, but there was a yes-or-no answer to what you found out. For example, we had to write some code for magnetorquers to see if our satellite was moving according to the right magnetic field. It wasn’t—it just spun around. But you could see it; you could see that what you’d made was wrong, and then you could fix it. I really liked that. I felt like what I was working on had an immediate impact and matched how I like to work, whereas I’m probably a bit too impatient for the more theoretical side.”
Cecilie now feels that she is better suited to the hands-on problem-solving of the space industry than to a career in theoretical cosmology.
Cecilie at the National Space Conference in Aalborg this year explaining the DISCO-2 mission. (Credit: Morten Irgens-Møller Nielsen)
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