Cork women on team launching Ireland’s first satellite

Ireland's first satellite is due to launch into orbit next week and two women from county Cork are at the centre of the action.

Laura Cotter from Minane Bridge and Rachel Dunwoody from Charleville are members of the UCD team which aims to make history next week with the launch of the EIRSAT-1 satellite.

Designed and built by Laura, Rachel and the team at UCD, the satellite will carry three experiments into space and report data back to a command centre on the Irish campus. The experiments will test new space technologies developed in Ireland, including an advanced instrument that will probe the early universe.

Laura is a PhD student in the UCD Space Science group, focusing on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and supernovae. She graduated with a BSc in Physics with Astronomy and Space Science from UCD in 2022. Laura is working on testing and operations for the EIRSAT-1 satellite. In the future she plans to use data from the satellite's detector to further her own PhD research.

“This has been a truly amazing project to work on,” said Laura. “Our team in UCD is the first in the country to design and build a satellite that will be launched into orbit and then operated from Ireland. Having started on this project as a student and worked on it for so long, it is extremely exciting to now be this close to launch date.”

Throughout the project, Laura and her team mates worked with the European Space Agency’s Fly Your Satellite programme to receive training, space-expert mentoring and hands-on guidance. The development of the spacecraft at UCD has seen the introduction of space systems engineering and skills that have not previously existed in Irish industry or academia.