Lobo Spotlight: Craig Kief

@ArdeeTheJourno

Craig Kief munched on a slice at a pizza party in the headquarters of UNM’s Configurable Space Microsystems and Innovations and Applications Center Tuesday night. As the clock struck 6 p.m., Kief’s and other attendees’ gaze stayed frozen on a large screen.

“We had 40 people over here,” Kief said. “We set up a big projector screen to watch the launch. It was pretty exciting. You have a lot of people collectively holding their breath because for the most part, we had a 10 percent chance that the rocket would fail and it would end up in the ocean.”

But the odds were in their favor. That night, Trailblazer, UNM’s first satellite, launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia into outer space.

And for the next year, Kief, COSMIAC’s deputy director, and research engineer Brian Zufelt will lead a team of researchers to track the progress of Trailblazer.

Kief said construction of the Trailblazer began two years ago, but was delayed a couple of times, especially when the federal government shut down in October. He said the satellite, a 4 inch by 4 inch by 4 inch CubeSat, will measure radiation in the upper atmosphere to aid with signal research and will be monitored on campus.

“We have antennae,” he said. “They’re about 18 feet long, and we use those antennae to communicate with the spacecraft as it goes over, to tell it, ‘Hello, how are you?’ and to hear back from it … We’ll be using it as a platform for student project. Students will be able to transmit to it their own name, and transmit back to them from space.”

The satellite travels at an immense speed of 5 miles per second, Kief said. He said it will be visible on the horizon four to five times a day.

And UNM will be tracking the progress of Trailblazer independent of NASA, Kief said.

Kief, 54, started working with COSMIAC at his current position in 2008 after obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering from UNM. He said he has always loved the University’s commitment to scientific fields and research.

Kief said students have been involved with the creation of the Trailblazer. He said the project has benefited them by providing them hands-on problem-solving experience.

“It has allowed students to actually have hands-on experience,” he said. “Most of the time, students do educational experiences that they learn from the book, and they make projects that have known solutions … Building for space is very difficult because you have relative extremes of temperatures and vacuum and radiation, which makes operating in space very, very difficult.”

At the moment, COSMIAC is working on the University’s second satellite named ORS2, Kief said. He said he encourages any student interested in getting involved with the project to contact his office directly.