SATGUS (Mark Rober)

IF YOU HAVE AN IDEA ABOUT A THING, AND THAT THING DOESN'T EXIST, YOU CAN JUST WILL IT INTO EXISTENCE.

-MARK ROBER

SATGUS is a 12U CubeSat designed and built by Tyvak International of Milan, Italy, to enable users worldwide to upload photos and specify their city. Using Redwire’s flight-proven camera technology, SATGUS captures high dynamic range (HDR) images of user-submitted selfies displayed on a Google Pixel phone mounted on the satellite, with Earth as the backdrop. The captured photos are then transmitted back to Earth.

The SATGUS mission is part of a broader science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) initiative aimed at raising awareness of space’s impact on daily life and supporting underserved engineering students globally. The "Space Selfie project" was launched by CrunchLabs, an initiative founded by Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer and YouTube content creator. The project allows participants to send selfies to space, display them on the satellite-mounted phone, capture a photo with Earth in the background, and receive the image upon transmission back to Earth.

SATGUS was launched onboard SpaceX’s Transporter-12 Rideshare mission on January 14, 2025 from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The launch vehicle was a Falcon 9 Block 5. SATGUS now resides in an SSO orbit, with an inclination of 97.7, an altitude of 590km, and a period spanning 96.4 minutes.

-Gunter’s Space Page

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

AG1: Boot Up
AG2: Solar Arrays
AG3: Antennas
AG4: Camera
AG5: Screen

Activate AGs in numerical order. IMPORTANT! Activate AG3 while AG2 is deploying to avoid a catastrophic failure.

ENJOY!