Led by Waratah Seed Consortium partner Professor Andrew Dempster, the Australian Centre for Space Engineering and Research at the University of NSW (ACSER), received a Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant of $690k in late 2021 for development of a new Spacecraft Innovation Laboratory.
The new lab will include a Satellite Bus, Electrodynamic Shaker, Solar Simulator and an Electromagnetic Anechoic Chamber, and the facility will provide a valuable resource, particularly to space start-ups, for the integration and testing of cubesats.
Spacecraft Innovation Laboratory facilities will be accessible to payloads flying with the Waratah Seed mission.
Lab partners include Sydney University, Macquarie University and Delta-V Space Alliance, also partners in the Waratah Seed mission.
IN 2022, ACSER also received a grant of over $2 million to set up the Space Resources Environmental Analogue Facility (SREAF), providing a venue to allow researchers to test equipment in realistic space conditions including emulating conditions on the moon and mars, to assist the development of space robotics for geological sample collection in space.
Professor Dempster is the Director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research (ACSER) at the University of NSW, and Deputy Director of CUAVA.
He was the lead partner in the development of the cubesats UNSW-EC0 and INSPIRE-2, both of which have been successfully deployed in space.
