By Bastiaan Bosman, Team manager
The last quarter, the Da Vinci Satellite team has been hard at work on every part of the project. Every aspect is now
nearing completion. This update will give you the ins and outs of what the team has done over the past weeks.
General
Currently we are hard at work recruiting new team memebers to ensure that the team can continue at its current
pace in the next academic year. Next to that, we are finalising the details for the agreement with the university. Once
this is completed, we can send out the forms to secure the radio frequencies that we need to communicate to our
Da Vinci Satellite. Sadly, we do have to announce that we were forced to delay our launch to January 2023 as there
were some uncertainties in the testing schedule. We decided that it is better to be safe than sorry. To get back to a
more happy note, I would like to introduce Camille van Weert as our interim technical manager. He he will stay with
the team for the remainder of this academic year.
Technical developement update
The technical department received the solar panels from Airbus in March, this marked the end of the procurement phase as most of the subsystems are currently with the team. The final phase before launch was kicked-off at the end of March. Tests are prepared or underway of all subcomponents of the bus subsystems, as well as tweaks to the payloads
are being made. The picture to the right shows two of our engineers working with the iEPS.
Financial update
The finance team has been hard at work in several aspects. What we are ready to share with you we will detail below,
concerning the launch and funding opportunities we have been working on!
Launch opportunities
Since our last update, we have made a definite choice on our launch broker: ISISpace. We had been in talks with other
parties, but ISISpace offered us the most favourable set of services and so our preference eventually lay with them!
Regarding the launch date, you can find more information below!
Funding opportunities
The members of the finance team responsible for contacting funds, grants and potential sponsors have also not been
without work! A great deal of organisations and foundations have been contacted over the past period for a mix of
funding and in-kind sponsoring: we have not received definitive confirmation on any new partners so far, though, and
so we cannot share any names with you. Expect a lot of updates on that next time!
To aid us in being awarded these grants, we notice that the main reason we are denied grants for is a wish for more
measurable, concrete social sustainability initiatives. Hence, if you have an idea we can use to make our project more
accessible for children from disadvantaged backgrounds in a measurable and concrete manner we would be glad to
have your feedback!
Public relations update
The public relations team has also adopted some new faces, as you might have seen on our social media. In the coming
weeks we want to start introducing you to the faces of the other teams!
Education update
The education team has been working hard on the development of various educational modules.
Primary school
As the primary school team has finalised the educational module in collaboration with SpaceBuzz, an opportunity has
opened up to work on another educational module! This new module will contain strictly tangible things and see-able
sights. The children will work as scientists and explorers to find out how approachable space really is! Believe it or not,
this dark, far-away and all-encompassing void actually holds quite a lot of treasures – treasures we can even find close to
home, right here on Earth! The children will see how close and approachable space is by exploring their own back- and
schoolyard and looking at the stars and planets, after all: Space is open to all!
High school
The high school team has been steadily chipping away at the mountain of work. The computer science team has finalised
the module and has started testing the module on high schools! The Masterclass team has finalised their first
masterclass for high school students and has already performed a demo session with great success! This masterclass
was all about our solar system: The formation of the solar system, the planets within and the ultimate death of our
solar system. The masterclass will be open to all high school students in The Netherlands! Our third module, the mentor
class module, aims to broaden the horizon of students and ultimately help decide with choosing their electives
(profielkeuze). The idea has been generated in broad term and now, under our guidance, the module is being developed
by three enthusiastic students (Milla, Mithusa and Meike) of the Gerrit Rietveld Technasium.
We hope to have informed you about our progress over the last few weeks. If you have any questions or want to help
us out with anything, you can always send us an email.