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Northeastern Satellite Lab

We’re a student club at Northeastern University that designs, builds, and launches small satellites. In April 2026 our first one, PROVES Atlas, was deployed from the International Space Station. The next, TeraLink-1, is on the bench now.

You don’t need experience to join. New members start at Intro to Satellites, Mondays at 7 PM in Forsyth 129. The rest of the week’s meetings are on the schedule.

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Five club members look up at the camera from around a table covered in CubeSat boards and tools
Members of the PROVES Atlas team with the satellite's boards and flight hardware. Photo: Margot Murphy/The Huntington News.

What we’re working on

  • PROVES Atlas

    In orbit since April 2026

    Our first satellite. A camera CubeSat, built by about 15 students in under a year and deployed from the ISS with four other university satellites.

  • Diagram of TeraLink-1's links. The satellite sends telemetry over UHF and runs the 225 GHz terahertz experiment with the campus dish, then sends the experiment data over S-band to AWS ground stations. TeraLink-1UHFtelemetry225 GHzTHz linkS-bandexperiment dataUHF stationTHz dish, BostonAWS ground stations

    TeraLink-1

    Critical Design Review in November

    A 6U CubeSat that will try the first terahertz link from space to the ground. Funded by AFRL’s University Nanosatellite Program.

  • Cross-section of the 2 m Cassegrain dish. Signals reflect off the primary dish onto a small subreflector and back down to the feed horn at the center. The primary must hold its shape to within 83 micrometers. 2 mSubreflectorPrimary reflector83 µm surfaceFeed horn, 225 GHz

    Sub-THz Ground Station

    System Requirements Review

    The other end of that link: a 2 m reflector dish that must hold its shape to within 83 µm.

  • Diagram of DEWSat. The satellite images farmland in tiles, scores each tile for drought risk on board, and sends only the high-risk tiles down to the ground over S-band. 550 km, sun-synchronousDEWSatGroundS-band:high-risk tilesonlyRed + NIR imagery,scored on boardHigh drought riskLow risk, stays on board

    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.

We also help the MIT Satellite Team with LEONIRD, and run open-source projects like a star tracker and a mission simulator. All projects.

How the club works

Every member joins one of four teams, each with its own weekly meeting:

  • Hardware: structures, circuit boards, power, and firmware
  • Software: flight and ground-station code
  • Simulations: orbits, dynamics, and mission analysis
  • Business: proposals, funding, outreach, and operations

The Business team finds and writes the competition entries and grant proposals that pay for the hardware. The club started in 2020 as Project Horizon inside AeroNU and became its own club in Spring 2026. Our faculty advisor is Dr. Josep Jornet. More about us.

Quick facts

teams
4
space missions
2
research grants won
3+
members per semester
20+

Who we work with

Partners and mentors:
  • NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative
  • AFRL’s University Nanosatellite Program
  • Northeastern’s Institute for Intelligent Network Systems
  • UNLab
  • NSF CIRC
  • PROVES
  • Cal Poly Pomona Bronco Space
  • the MIT Satellite Team
  • Morehead State University
Members and alumni have gone on to:
  • MIT Lincoln Laboratory
  • SpaceX
  • Blue Origin
  • Draper
  • MITRE
  • RTX
  • General Dynamics Electric Boat
  • Space Dynamics Laboratory
  • Specter Aerospace
  • Shield AI
  • Morse Corp
  • Kostas Research Institute
  • Robotics and AI Institute
  • Tesla
  • Akamai
  • Stripe
  • Wayfair
  • Fidelity Investments
  • Notch
  • bionet
  • FBI
  • Harvard Medical School
  • Stanford University
  • Stanford HAI
  • Northeastern INSI

In the news

Mailing list

Meeting times, launch news, and ways to get involved, for Northeastern students and the NSL community.