UiTMSAT-1: building skills through BIRDS-2

UiTMSAT-1 was Universiti Teknologi MARA’s participation in BIRDS-2, the Kyushu Institute of Technology-led project involving Malaysia, Bhutan and the Philippines. Two Malaysian postgraduate students, Syazana Basyirah Mohammad Zaki and Muhammad Hasif Azami, worked within the international team. Its other spacecraft were BHUTAN-1 and Maya-1. These are separate spacecraft within a shared project, not three names for one satellite.

UiTM’s university archive traces preparation from 2016 through completion of the spacecraft in 2018. A shared design and mentoring environment gave students experience beyond a single classroom exercise. Teams had to connect subsystems and meet common requirements, while participating institutions could develop their own ground capability and carry experience into later projects. Collaboration can therefore produce both flight hardware and a network of people able to operate it.

UiTMSAT-1 traveled to the ISS aboard a Falcon 9 cargo mission on June 29, 2018. JAXA records the BIRDS-2 group’s release from Kibo on August 10. The NASA photograph shows all three small spacecraft after that release; it does not identify which individual object occupies each position. The shared deployment image also appears in the Philippines course because it documents the same international event.

While carried as cargo, a CubeSat is not yet conducting its independent free-flying mission. Release starts a new operational stage in which teams need to establish communications and check spacecraft condition. A received beacon can provide useful status evidence, but it is not automatically proof that every payload objective has succeeded. Each claim needs the corresponding measurement, whether a decoded status packet or a validated experiment result.

Measure the specific activity

The university’s account reports received signals after deployment. Receiving and interpreting them requires ground equipment, correct configuration and people who understand the data. In a fictional exercise, a team expects twenty status packets during a pass and decodes fifteen. Its decoding fraction is fifteen divided by twenty, or 75 percent. This number describes that contact exercise, not the percentage of the whole mission that succeeded.

A team improves by recording conditions: antenna pointing, receiver settings, interference and spacecraft geometry can all matter. Comparing passes under documented conditions is more useful than simply labeling one pass good and another bad. UiTMSAT-1 connects the larger BIRDS-2 collaboration with local practice, showing how a small satellite can support engineering education while keeping claims about the actual flight tied to specific observations.