MEMESat-1 is a satellite for – you guessed it – beaming memes down from Low Earth Orbit. Primarily focused on educational outreach for all ages and backgrounds, we hope to get YOU psyched on space. MEMESat is a 1U CubeSat equipped with an FM repeater for amateur radio transmission and public telemetry for science lessons and experiments! We plan to release lesson plans for all grade-levels and backgrounds! Beyond all of that outreach garbage, MEMESat-1 is going to be the largest on-orbit store of memes to ever exist. With your help, we hope to gather enough memes and funding to support daily meme transmission for years. That’s right, we want to help YOU meme from space. Meme downlink and spacecraft health data will be available on amateur radio frequencies, the official MEMESat website, and our official iOS and Android apps! What better way to help the community come together than teaching, connecting, and memeing?

Rockin’ a mean 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm form-factor, MEMESat has a lot of memes in a small package. Let’s talk about what’s under the hood.

Electrical Power System (EPS):
This bad boy generates power from 6 custom solar panel boards sporting TriSolX 28% efficiency Germanium solar cells. Our state-of-the-art __Wh lithium-ion battery stack and power distribution board, developed by the University of Cincinnati CubeCats, will provide us with ample power storage on orbit for meme transmission and constant telemetry beacons.

Attitude Determination and Control (ADC):
With all this energy, our satellite doesn’t have much attitude control. A spacecraft’s attitude is it’s orientation in space – basically the science of where its pointing. With a single magnetorquer pointing in MEMESat’s z-axis, we’ll be able to keep rough pointing towards earth. To distribute power and heat evenly across the spacecraft, we’re incorporating racing stripes. These stripes are white strips of space-rated tape, placed slightly towards the right side of each solar panel. The difference in color and reflectivity of the solar panels and white tape create a noticeable solar pressure differential across the side of the satellite facing the sun, thus inducing spin. That’s a whole lot of science to make our space toaster slowly spin without electronics.

Command and Data Handling (CDH):
Choose a flight computer?

Communications (COMMS):
Our satellite is quite the screamer. Equipped with a Nanoavionics FM Repeater and an ISIS (yep, there’s a smallsat company called ISIS) Transeiver, users will be able to send messages to the repeater on VHF bands and hear their message being repeated on UHF bands. Users will be able to hear our telemetry on the longer propagating VHF bands though, with certain UHF bands reserved for uplink to our satellite. The frequencies we communicate on are ‘amateur bands’ allocated to us through the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU). This space toaster runs a NanoAvionics FM Repeater for amateur radio users to interact with on VHF bands. Spacecraft health data and telemetry is beamed down from an ISIS (that’s right, ISIS) UHF/VHF full duplex transceiver with a mean 4 Watt full-power transmit. These radios will allow users around the world to share messages with each other, receive spacecraft health data, and – most importantly – receive memes.

Payload:
What’s our payload? Nothing other than the megabytes, gigabytes, or terabytes of memes that we receive from you guys! On a secondary note, you could call our radios our payloads! Enabling amateur radio users to communicate with our FM Repeater.