Dr David Murphy. Image: University College Dublin
‘I think we’re all very proud of doing an ‘Irish first’, but there’s a lot of weirdness that comes with that,’ says Dr David Murphy.
Nearly eight years of hard work went into what became Ireland’s first-ever satellite launch in late 2023. Now, taking a look back at the journey, the satellite’s systems engineer and a research fellow at the University College Dublin (UCD) C-Space, Centre for Space Research Dr David Murphy tells Silicon Republic.com that this experience has been nothing short of incredible – but in a weird way.
Ireland’s first satellite, the small EIRSAT-1 was developed by a team of researchers and students at UCD with support from Queen’s University Belfast, and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). The project was the brainchild of Murphy and Prof Lorraine Hanlon – Murphy’s supervisor, who were working on a gamma ray detector which was eventually sent up to space with the satellite.
Gamma rays – invisible from Earth – have the shortest wavelengths and the highest energy of any wave in the electromagnetic spectrum. They are produced by the hottest and most energetic objects in the universe such as neutron stars and supernova explosions – and 10 months into the launch, in October, the EIRSAT-1 made its first two gamma ray detections within an hour of each other.
“So we’ve been waiting – I guess eight months – to get the first one and 50 minutes later, we got the second one,” Murphy says, laughing.
A long journey ahead
Murphy and Hanlon were working on their gamma ray detector in 2016 when the ESA put out a call for ideas for its Fly Your Satellite! program under its Education Office.
Deciding that they had some interesting ideas, the two put forward a proposal in early 2017, which the ESA responded to “within days”.
Murphy says he was taken aback by the interest. “We were kind of really surprised to be honest. We weren’t we weren’t expecting such strong interest.”
Later, the two found themselves in Belgium giving an hour-long presentation and Q&A session, which gave Murphy “good vibes”. And he was right, as just two weeks later, the two got an email invite onto the program.
“It was really amazing. So that was like really the start of all the hard work.”
So, it was announced to the public in 2017 that the EIRSAT-1, short for Educational Research Satellite-1, would be built by an Irish team, comprising of researchers and five space tech companies – Resonate Ltd, Enbio, SensL, Parameter Space and Moog Dublin.
That summer, Murphy got a bunch of students together to work on the satellite’s critical review design process.
“We were basically locked in a conference room all summer just working non-stop on the design of the satellite. And then at the end of that year, the experts reviewed our design,” he says – a design that has remained unchanged since.
Lack of regulations and delayed timelines
The team went into building the EIRSAT-1, a 2U cubesat – a small satellite – with a length and width of about 10.6cm and a height of 22.7cm.
However, the team encountered unexpected regulatory issues. Prior to the EIRSAT, Ireland had not launched a satellite before, which meant that authorities had little prior experience on certain regulations.
“We approached ComReg [Ireland’s telecommunications regulator, the Commission for Communications Regulation] to register frequencies, and they were like – we don’t know how to do this – no one’s ever needed to do this before.
“Similarly,” Murphy says, “there was no law that existed to allow you to launch a satellite. You know, it just hadn’t been considered that anyone would want to do this.”
Meanwhile, as the EIRSAT-1 team continued breaking frontiers in Ireland, it also came to light that Ireland had not fully ratified its outer space treaty – a United Nations treaty on space exploration – which led to a debate in the Dáil in October 2022.
“This process was happening in the background, and because of cabinet secrecy they couldn’t tell us any of this.
“So we all woke up one day, and there were all these new stories in the papers that there was going to be a debate in the Dáil about the outer space treaty.
“We’re like, oh this might have been our fault, that’s a bit weird! But luckily the debate went really well,” Murphy says.
However, the team encountered one more roadblock that put plans back by a year.
Originally, the EIRSAT-1 was set to launch on the ESA’s Vega-C rocket. However, a failed launch, which incidentally happened on the same day as the team’s 2022 Christmas party, brought about doubts and dampened their mood.
The EIRSAT-1 had up till then been scheduled to go on the next flight, but the team now had to search for another rocket.
“That was a big delay for us and it hit some of the team really hard – a big hit to the morale.”
However, a year later, on 1 December 2023, the EIRSAT-1 was finally sent into orbit on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Two findings in the same day
In mid-October this year, ten months after the EIRSAT-1 was initially launched, the Gamma-ray Module (GMOD), one of the payloads on board the satellite, detected two gamma ray bursts within an hour of each other.
“I got a message quite late at night. It was like ‘hey, are you still up? I think there’s something here’. And so we looked at the data that we download from the satellite,” Murphy, who is also the team’s GMOD lead, said.
“And there was these two tiny, like really tiny little blips in the data.”
The GMOD was designed to detect bursts of high energy radiation emitted from the biggest, most destructive events in the universe such as the formation of a black hole from a collapsar (dying massive star) or the merging of neutron stars.
The UCD team found that the GMOD detected the merging of neutron stars three billion light years away and corroborated its findings with other spacecrafts, which also reported the same.
“It’d be great to get a third but we still haven’t gotten the third,” Murphy laughs, “hopefully any day now.”
More things planned
UCD’s Prof Sheila McBreen, one of Ireland’s leading astrophysicists and an expert in gamma-ray bursts, will be expanding on the GMOD with a 6U cubesat – three times larger than the EIRSAT-1 for her project ‘Gamma-ray Investigation of the Full Transient Sky’.
Meanwhile, Murphy has been leading another ESA-funded project in collaboration with researchers from several other European countries.
The project, which has not been fully approved yet, is called ‘Comcube’, which will put a Compton telescope – a type of gamma instrument – in a number of cubesats, creating a ‘swarm’ of small satellites that can communicate with each other and share data.
“What we came up with it was this idea of 27 satellites forming a ring around the equator of the Earth and they’re looking for these gamma ray bursts
“Because we have 27 of them all around the Earth you can detect the gamma ray bursts regardless of what direction they come from … and one of them will always be over a ground station so you can get that message that a gamma ray burst has occurred to the ground.”
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