Projects
The full portfolio. Satellite and ground-station programs, national competitions, and open-source R&D.
Flagship Projects
Our major projects; check out their dedicated pages!
PROVES Atlas
Launched · April 2026
Northeastern’s first satellite: a student-built camera CubeSat, deployed from the ISS as part of a five-university constellation.
TeraLink-1
Critical Design Review
A 6U CubeSat for the first-ever terahertz space-to-ground link demo, funded by AFRL’s University Nanosatellite Program.
Leads: Noah Typrin, Landon Bayer
Sub-THz Ground Station
System Requirements Review
TeraLink-1’s ground segment: a 2 m reflector dish with 83 µm surface accuracy for 225 GHz uplink and downlink.
Lead: Riley Ashok
DEWSat
NASA Space to Soil finalist
A drought early-warning satellite that scores farmland for drought risk in orbit and sends down only the high-risk images.
Lead: Swati Sundaram
Core Projects
Smaller than a flagship program, each with its own lead.
LEONIRD CubeSat
Payload development
An MIT-led, open-source, payload-agnostic satellite bus made of three 1U CubeSats, built on PyCubed and moving to F´ and Zephyr, with a licensing target of December. NSL is helping choose a 1U payload instrument and supporting payload engineering and bus design across firmware, software, and mechanics.
With the MIT Satellite Team · Lead: Laura Teixeira
Miniature EPS
Lesson series
A miniature electrical power system board, built step by step in a workshop series during Hardware meetings.
Lead: Vishhal Kumar
Rising Projects
Competitions and open-source R&D. The tools and hardware we build in the open are free for any student or researcher to use.
Open-Source Star Tracker Software
In development
An open attitude-determination algorithm that identifies a spacecraft’s orientation from the stars it sees. A Software team project.
SatSim
Early development
An open-source Python framework for end-to-end CubeSat mission simulation, with modules for orbital mechanics, spacecraft dynamics, and mission analysis. The goal is a tool people actually use for mission design and teaching. It’s the Simulations team’s mission sandbox.
Deployable Solar Panel System
In development
A student-designed deployable solar-panel mechanism that gets more power out of a CubeSat’s small surface area.
PEAK funded
Pointing & Tracking System
Apply to join
Pointing and tracking development alongside Northeastern PhD students. Spots are limited, so members apply to join.
With PhD students
Cornell-Style ChipSats
Up next
Chip-scale satellites in the style of Cornell’s ChipSats, where the whole spacecraft fits on one small circuit board. A new Hardware project that’s just getting started.