News and Events
- Biomedical Engineering Innovator Receives 2023 NovaUCD Innovation Champion of the Year Award
- Inventor of Disruptive Biosensors with Industrial Bioprocessing Applications Receives 2023 NovaUCD Invention of the Year Award
- seamlessCARE Receives 2023 NovaUCD Spin-Out of the Year Award
- Prof Francesco Pilla launches new bike libraries for Dublin primary schools
- Launch of WATSON Project at UCD
- UCD's Livija Vasilenkaite - First Prize Winner #ThisIsEngineering2023
- Minister Harris and Commissioner McGuinness announce first recipients under the €65M National Challenge Fund
- Séamus McDermott receives his Honorary Doctorate
- Ten Days in the Ruhr - A Student Engineer's Diary (1952) - The Final Days
- Ten Days in the Ruhr - A Student Engineer's Diary (1952) - Part 3
- Ten Days in the Ruhr - A Student Engineer's Diary (1952) - Part 2
- College researchers recognised in UCD Research Impact Competition
- Ten Days in the Ruhr - A Student Engineer's Diary (1952)
- Arup Scholarship Presentation 2022
- UCD wins Higher Education Partnership of the Year Award at the Asia Matters Business Awards
- Dr Amiya Pandit wins the Thomas Mitchell Medal
- RIBA Stirling Prize 2022
- 2022 News Archive
- 2021 News Archive
- Go Eve: EV charging start-up wins UCD’s 2021 Start-Up of the Year
- Professor Anding Zhu elevated to IEEE Fellow
- Symposium: Inclusive Teaching & Learning Case Studies in Engineering, Architecture & Affiliated Disciplines
- Ireland’s first satellite measuring up at ESA for Space Week
- UCD Silicon Quantum Computing Spin-Out Receives Multimillion Euro Venture Capital Investment
- Prof Orla Feely delivers Presidential Address to Engineers Ireland on Ireland’s industrial transformation
- New EU Research Project “Screen4Care”: Accelerating Diagnosis for Rare Disease Patients Through Genetic Newborn Screening and Artificial Intelligence
- September 2021 Conferring Ceremony
- UCD’s Masters in Engineering Management (MEM) announces a big reduction in the requirement for on-campus attendance
- Early-Stage Venture Developing a Software Platform to Augment Human Memory Wins NovaUCD’s 2021 Student Enterprise Competition
- UCD project aiming to make dairy farms climate neutral awarded €2m Future Innovator Prize
- Samantha L. Martin-McAuliffe has been named a Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks
- UCD Professor Orla Feely inaugurated as President of Engineers Ireland
- 2021 Conferring Ceremony
- Irish Researchers Win Prestigious ICE Publishing Award
- Eco-friendly biological energy harvesting solutions from University College Dublin addresses real-time damage in water pipelines
- Prof Lizbeth Goodman named in the G100 Group of Global Leaders working for Women’s Equity and Transformational Change
- Barry Brophy was featured in the Sunday Independent last weekend with an article on sports communication
- Spotlight on Research: Cheryl L’Hirondelle
- UCD Engineers Among Winners of NovaUCD’s 2021 Innovation Awards
- UCD Teaching and Learning Awards
- FOREIGN EXCHANGE: Conversations on Architecture Here and Now
- Three Case Studies from Engineering and Architecture runners-up in 2020 UCD Impact Competition
- Earth Talks: Ravindranathan Thampi
- Two Winners of the Best Innovative Concept Detail Design in the GLDA Student & Graduate Design Competition 2020.
- Meet the 2021 Smartlab Winner of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts
- UCD teams shortlisted for SFI's €4m Future Innovator Prize challenge
- European researchers collaborate to prevent risks to transport infrastructure
- MaREI Award
- 2020 News Archive
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- Building the State
- A Centenary Celebration
Ireland’s first satellite measuring up at ESA for Space Week
Friday, 8 October, 2021
Working on the CubeSat at ESA Education Centre
UCD’s EIRSAT-1 team run tests on the first Irish spacecraft at European Space Agency centre in Belgium
8 October 2021
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN: During Space Week* (4-10 October) UCD’s space team is in the European Space Agency (ESA) Education Centre CubeSat Support Facility in Belgium, running crucial environmental tests on Ireland’s first satellite.
The EIRSAT-1 project is to build, test, launch and operate Ireland's first satellite which will perform in-orbit demonstrations of three novel payloads developed in UCD.
The team has already developed space systems skills that did not previously exist in Irish industry or academia and their work will position Ireland to benefit from global space industry growth expected in the coming decades, and inspire the next generation of students.
EIRSAT-1 selfie with the EQM at the ESA Education Centre
Speaking from the ESA Education Centre in Redu, Belgium, researcher and EIRSAT-1 Systems Engineer Dr David Murphy said: “It’s exciting to be at ESA Education’s CubeSat Support Facility during Space Week with EIRSAT-1’s environmental qualification model. The team is spending five weeks here to perform important environmental testing on the spacecraft. It has been shaken to simulate launch on a rocket and it is now being tested in the thermal vacuum chamber which subjects it to extreme hot and cold temperatures in a vacuum environment, just as it will experience during spaceflight. It’s incredible to see the project reach this very important milestone and to think about how far we have come since we first imagined EIRSAT-1.”
Researcher and EIRSAT-1 team member Dr. David Murphy working on the Cube Sat Engineering Qualification Model (EQM), at ESA Education Centre in Belgium.
While in space, EIRSAT-1 will detect and record bursts of gamma-rays using a detector developed by UCD’s Space Science group. It will also test a novel ‘attitude’ (spacecraft's orientation in space) control system developed by the Dynamics and Control Group in UCD, and test the performance in space of protective coatings made by Irish space tech firm ENBIO Ltd.
Director of UCD Centre for Space Research (C-Space), Professor Lorraine Hanlon said: "This exhaustive test campaign is the most important milestone for the EIRSAT-1 project so far. We knew that all the parts of the spacecraft could survive the launch and space environment but the enormous effort put in by the EIRSAT-1 team and ESA Fly Your Satellite! team has now given us confidence in the spacecraft as a whole. It means we have a solid, robust and capable design for the first Irish spacecraft. We now enter the build phase for the Flight Model with extremely high confidence."
UCD –C-Space member and Academic Lead on the gamma-ray detector module, Associate Professor Sheila McBreen said: “The gamma-ray detector was developed in-house from an idea and is now a payload in a qualified satellite. We look forward to measuring bursts of radiation from the deaths of stars in orbit with the flight model."
UCD C-Space member and Academic Lead on the Attitude, Determination and Control Systems (ADCS) subsystem and Wave Based Control (WBC) payload, Assistant Professor David McKeown said: “EIRSAT-1 gives us the ability to access novel ways of repositioning satellites and test the ideas we have developed over 10 years through working with ESA."
Head of the ESA Academy, Joost Vanreusel said: “The EIRSAT-1 mission of UCD is a truly unique and ambitious university project, in which the students are faced with the same type of challenges that ESA professionals are confronted with on a daily basis. By applying the same techniques that are used for larger satellites under guidance of ESA experts, the team’s hard work is serving two purposes: firstly verifying that the satellite will be ready to successfully execute its mission, while at the same time this next generation of space scientists and engineers is being further trained to work on Ireland’s and Europe’s future space programmes.”
The global space sector – which includes technology, communications and Earth Observation (which benefits industries such as transport and agriculture, as well as climate change monitoring) – has been growing by five per cent per year on average and is forecast to be worth €1 TRILLION by 2040.
Ireland is currently the only full member of ESA that does not have its own satellite but that will be rectified when EIRSAT-1 is delivered to ESA next year.
Visiting UCD for Space Week, Chair of Applied Space Technology at the University of Strathclyde, Professor Malcolm MacDonald joined UCD C-Space in conversation with national level policymakers to share insights from the successful Scottish space industry and discuss opportunities for Ireland through the National Space Strategy for Enterprise.
He said: “Scotland now has over 170 organisations involved in the space sector, which has grown by two thirds since 2014-15. The Scottish space success story has proven the direct link between funding for space research and growth in successful space activity. I welcome UCD's increasing space activity including EIRSAT-1 and the continuing space-related work across many schools.”
Ireland’s EIRSAT-1 team with ESA staff at the ESA Education Centre in Redu, Begium
*Space Week is Ireland’s newest national STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) week, in parallel with World Space Week, encouraging students, families, community groups and members of the public to come together with astrophysicists, the educational community, artists, hobby astronomers and space scientists to discover the wonders of the universe. ‘Women in Space’ is a theme of this year’s Space Week, organised MTU Blackrock Castle Observatory with the support of Science Foundation Ireland and ESERO Ireland.