The year 2022 has been a very eventful year here at the NTNU SmallSat Lab. We started the year with Covid-restrictions (again), which indeed impacted the surroundings of our most important event of the year; the launch of the HYPSO-1 satellite, carrying our in-house developed hyper-spectral camera. We had to keep the launch-event small, but we got cake, and we celebrated the first months of operation later in the spring. The main mission of the satellite is to make oceanographic observations, which indeed, the satellite has done! More than 800 observations from all around the world are recorded. We are building a catalog of data that we will prepare for sharing during next year. 

 
Launch cake! (Photo: Sivert Bakken)

In addition to observing selected areas such as areas with anticipated algal blooms, wild-fires and volcano eruptions, we participated during two multi-agent observations campaigns, one in Frohavet outside Trøndelag and one near Ny-Ålesund at Svalbard. Even though the clouds were fighting against us, and we had a sometimes steep learning curve on learning how to operate the satellite on our own, we got promising results, as shown in the image below, where a band-ratio algorithm has been used to enhance a bloom occurring at Prins Karls Forland in May. In addition to observing the oceans, we are also investigating how HYPSO-1 can be used to monitor fresh-water quality. 

Algal bloom (Photo and graphics: HYPSO-1 and Sivert Bakken) 

Much of the year we have gathered data to aid our on-orbit calibration effort, one important step
before we can release the data. In addition, we have developed and stream-lined our mission planning tools as well as our tools for pre-processing   of captures and metadata. 
But not to forget, we are also working on our next satellite, the HYPSO-2. The payload is being manufactured now and will be assembled and tested during the spring. HYPSO-2 will be an incremental upgrade of HYPSO-1, with bigger solar panels, a better downlink and a software-defined radio for communications experiments. We had plans for even more upgrades of the processing system, but the current supply-chain disruptions made this difficult. 
We have also increased our in-house testing capabilities, with a brand-new thermal vacuum chamber which we installed late December. This gives us the possibility to conduct more frequent and longer test campaigns, which will be important for HYPSO-2 and future missions (we have big plans!). 

TVAC chamber. Photo: Roger Birkeland

Many of our PhD-students have defended their thesis work this year (a big congratulations!!), and as expected in an academic project, some have left the team. Luckily, most continue working in the Norwegian space industry, and our paths may cross again. One new PhD-student joined this year, and next year the team will increase with even more. 
NTNU SmallSatLab and satellite activities at NTNU is not only about HYPSO. Orbit NTNU successfully launched their first satellite, the SelfieSat in May this year. Although the start of SelfieSat’s orbital life was a bit difficult, and we still struggle with getting the communication performance up to par, the results are starting to appear from SelfieSat too. Much of this is thanks to the efforts of our ground station provider KSAT. The image below shows one of the first images from SelfeSat, taken over parts of Sweden and Finland in November. As you can see from the image, the imaging settings are to be figured out. Across all projects, we are in total working on five on-going satellites and three more future missions. 

 
Northern Finland. Photo: SelfieSat/Orbit NTNU

With this, the team at NTNU SmallSatLab would like to wish all our collaborators around the world a peaceful Christmas time a happy new year and we are looking forward to working with you and our projects next year.