EIRSAT-1 team reveal that their new satellite was almost lost after launch...

Back on the 1st of December 2023, Ireland’s first satellite, EIRSAT-1 was launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The EIRSAT-1 control team revealed recently that the satellite was almost lost.

Shortly after launch, the satellite was rotating at 5 degrees per second taking 72 seconds to do a full rotation which was in line with expectations. However, that rotation speed increased and it was soon doing 30 degrees per second taking 12 seconds to do a full rotation. By the time the control station in Dublin had established contact with it, it was spinning at 50 degrees per second and getting faster.

In an interview, Eirstat-1 engineering manager Prof David McKeown said... “If it keeps spinning faster and faster, you won’t be able to communicate with it and you’ll lose the mission. The faster it gets, the harder it is to make it slow down again. Once it gets to a certain speed you can’t even send the commands to it to slow it down. This was very worrying. If it went on, that would have been curtains for us.”

To get a handle on what was going on, the control team had to do simulations on the ground and came up with a solution to slow down the rotation. 

Prof McKeown continues... “It is so much work, so much time over so many years. You get a mixture of relief and happiness. It is absolutely a technical success. We took no shortcuts. It was years of testing and it’s years of work that has paid off. We couldn’t be happier with the way things are working. All the critical systems are healthy. We have got data back from one of our payloads.”