Maeve Doyle

As part of my job at UCD, I work on the team developing Ireland’s first satellite, ‘EIRSAT-1’ or the Educational Irish Research Satellite. EIRSAT-1 is a 2U CubeSat, a small satellite measuring in units (U) of 10cm x 10cm x 10cm that has been designed, built and tested by a team of students, early career scientists and staff at UCD. The EIRSAT-1 project is being supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), under the Fly Your Satellite! Program. 

A typical day for Meave:  

Earlier in the project, my day primarily consisted of developing and testing software with the satellite’s hardware involved, known as ‘hardware-in-the-loop’ (HIL) testing. The hardware is situated in EIRSAT-1’s clean room, however, as we have a set-up that supports remote working for software development, I primarily worked outside of the clean room, at my desk at home or in the office at UCD. Now that the software is in a more flight-ready state, my day primarily involves preparations for and carrying out operator training, where the wider team learn how to interface with the flight software to command and control EIRSAT-1 on orbit. This involves a few team members at a time, sitting at the EIRSAT-1 Operations Station, commanding the satellite to carry out tasks in the same way that we intend to do during the actual mission. To make this more representative of flight, we also include some difficult aspects of on orbit operations into this training, such as highly limited communication times between the satellite that is “in orbit” and the ground station at UCD. 

Top tip from Meave for those interested in a similar career:

This job is very well suited to those who enjoy a challenge and problem solving. This is important as much of your time might be spent trying to track down a bug in the software and/or to think of a way to overcome it.