Tucson Tech: Small-satellite startup Lunasonde flying high after SpaceX launch

A Tucson tech startup is flying high after its tiny test satellite was blasted into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket recently.

And this is just the beginning for Lunasonde, which in the next few years, plans to create a constellation of microsatellites that use low-frequency radar to map minerals and other resources far below the Earth’s surface.

Lunasonde’s latest satellite prototype — a CubeSat or cubic device roughly 4 inches in each dimension — was carried to space on a Falcon 9 rocket on Nov. 11 and deployed to a sun-synchronous, low-Earth orbit.

The satellite, dubbed Picacho, was sent up to test a mechanism to deploy a skinny, 12-foot-long antenna and to test communications systems, said Jeremiah Pate, Lunasonde’s young founder and CEO.

Pate, a former University of Arizona student who dove into entrepreneurship while still in high school, said he wasn’t nervous as he watched a livestream of Picacho’s launch aboard SpaceX’s Transporter 9 satellite “rideshare” mission from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base from the comfort of his Tucson home.

“Everybody thinks the launch is the scary part,” Pate said. “But thankfully, it is not the launch itself, with SpaceX flying so regularly, launches are now more reliable than ever. The scary part for us is the deployment of that large antenna, and that intended deployment didn’t happen for a few days.”

But Picacho eventually sent a signal indicating that the antenna had deployed, and Lunasonde has already received some initial signals, so its novel antenna — a thin metal strip that rolls out just like a carpenter’s tape measure — appears to be working, Pate said.

That long antenna is needed because Lunasonde’s technology uses very-low-frequency radio waves for detecting subsurface features up to 2 kilometers deep, Pate said.

While the radar guns police use to catch speeders have wavelengths millimeters or centimeters wide, the low-frequency wavelengths used by Lunasonde are about a kilometer wide, he explained.

“So they’re these enormous radio waves and as a result, we have to build a lot of custom components and have a very big deployable antenna in order to operate at these frequencies,” Pate said.

Mapping resources

Picacho is the second CubeSat Lunasonde has launched, after putting a similar-sized “1U” or one unit CubeSat (each unit being 10 centimeters or about 3.9 inches in each dimension) into orbit aboard a SpaceX rideshare flight in 2022 to test some basic communication systems.

Next up, Lunasonde plans to send a 6-unit CubeSat — about the size of a shoebox — into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket in June to test an even larger antenna system, Pate said.

Eventually, the company plans a constellation of eight 6U satellites that will work together to create a 3D map of Earthbound resources such as metals and water.

Lunasonde and its staff of about a dozen mostly engineers build its tiny satellites at its headquarters office in the Catalina Foothills, where its lab space includes a large Faraday cage to isolate radar equipment from outside radio signals during testing and a clean room for satellite assembly.

The company also has a thermal vacuum chamber cooled with liquid nitrogen to test equipment in the simulated vacuum of space, which Pate says costs about half a million dollars.

Pate said the imaging technology Lunasonde uses is a form of “impedance spectroscopy,” essentially measuring how an object responds electrically to different radio frequencies.

“And so we’re doing the same thing just with our radar, where we have transmitted bands in a certain bandwidth and we look at the different amplitudes of that across the spectrum and from that, each different type of deposit has a unique fingerprint that we can go through and identify,” he said.

The company also has developed its own software, dubbed Ingot, to process and display its 3D radar images.

Mines and water

Lunasonde’s technology — which it calls “MRI for Planet Earth” — can save time and money in finding viable mineral deposits and help the environment by reducing the need for exploratory drilling and digging, he said.

Small-scale, terrestrial ground-penetrating radar systems already are used for some mining applications, as well as for things like archaeology and locating underground utilities.

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While he can’t name them, Pate said he has already talked to a couple of the top five mining companies in the world that are interested in working with Lunasonde, while some smaller mining operators are interested in getting a leg up in finding new resources like rare-earth elements in high demand for batteries and other tech devices.

“So really across the whole mining industry, we’ve had an enormous amount of interest, especially in the rare-earths space because that’s something that is so urgently needed,” Pate said.

But despite the increasing urgency over scarce water resources in the West, Lunasonde isn’t finding much interest in its technology from that sector.

“Water is actually the easiest thing for us to find,” Pate said, noting that the company could track aquifers and how they change over time.

“The only issue is that the people who want to look for water resources are the ones who don’t have the money, and the ones that have the money don’t see the need,” he said, adding the company may offer water detection as an add-on service to its minerals business.

Meanwhile, Lunasonde is attracting plenty of attention from investors.

Lunasonde, which was part of the prestigious Techstars program in Boston last year, has raised more than $11 million in capital from investors, including Drive Capital, Promus Ventures and Lockheed Martin.

From biochem to orbit

It’s been quite a personal journey for Pate, 25, who won a top award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2017 for his work on a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease while attending Basis Oro Valley High School.

Pate, who missed his high school graduation to attend the science fair in Los Angeles, also won a trip to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm and a full scholarship to the UA.

He enrolled as a biochemistry major, but by that time, he had already launched Lunasonde in 2016 to advance his idea for a satellite-based radar ground scanning.

Pate quit school to focus on Lunasonde and is now pursuing a degree in physics through Arizona State University’s online program.

In 2020, Pate was named to Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” in manufacturing and industry.

Though Lunasonde is still in testing mode and the latest prototype represents an incremental step, Pate says the company’s success so far is a win for the little guys in Tucson’s nascent New Space industry.

“It’s not a huge step forward for Lunasonde, but honestly, I think it’s a massive step forward for the Tucson aerospace community, for the Arizona aerospace community,” Pate said. “Because in the past, a lot of aerospace here has been dominated by the bigger players, the Raytheons, etcetera, and so now we’re starting to see startups in Arizona building these really advanced satellites and using them.”

Old Pueblo, New Space

One of those Tucson companies is UA tech spinoff FreeFall Aerospace, which has developed an inflatable antenna for satellites.

FreeFall’s antenna is set to be launched into orbit as part of the UA student-made CatSat satellite, now scheduled to ride aboard a rocket launched by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace in March 2024.

Last month, FreeFall was accepted as a member of the latest cohort of space startups in the Seraphim Space/Generation Space Accelerator.

Meanwhile, Tucson-based small rocket and microsatellite startup Phantom Space Corp. recently inked a deal with Massachusetts-based Tropical Weather Analytics Inc. to design, manufacture, launch, and operate its Hurricane Hunter Satellite Constellation to monitor and better predict severe weather.

Phantom, led by early SpaceX veteran Jim Cantrell, said it also recently signed a contract with D-Orbit, an Italian company that offers satellite deployment services, to provide launch services for multiple future missions.

After successful hot-fire ground testing of its rocket engines, Phantom is planning for the first flight of its Daytona rocket in early 2025.