Sapling 1, 2 (Sapling Sempervirens, Sapling Giganteum)

Sapling 1 [Cal Poly]

Sapling 1 or Sapling Sempervirens is a 1U CubeSat technology demonstration mission by Stanford University.

It is the first mission is to test critical subsystems of the Sapling CubeSat Bus. The Sapling project is entirely open source and was created by members of the Stanford Student Space Initiative, a primarily undergraduate volunteer student engineering organization at Stanford University.

The second goal is to demonstrate the Pleiades Swarm Initiative's broader goal of developing and demonstrating distributed spacecraft technology. This preliminary demonstration will include satellite-to-satellite and satellite-to-satellite-to-ground relays. Depending on final orbital parameters, the ultimate goal will be a ground-to-satellite-to-ground link between a station operated by students at Cal Poly Pomona's Bronco Space and a station operated by students at Stanford's Student Space Initiative.

This mission's radio-networking demonstration is a collaboration between student groups who want to use a network of satellites to send simple messages between two universities, and then use that experience to build a more complex radio networking swarm of satellites.

If the radio networking demonstration is successful, amateurs using the correct LoRa modulation and packet structures could potentially relay their own packets through the network when Cal Poly or Stanford operators are not actively using it. The prospect of catching a telemetry packet, as with all amateur satellite missions, will inspire other students around the world to pursue radio communications and other satellite possibilities of their own imagination.

It was launched in January 2023 on Falcon-9 v1.2 (Block 5) on the Orbiter SN1 space tug. Orbiter SN1 suffered a power failure in orbit, which prevented the satellites from being deployed.

A second satellite, Sapling 2 or Sapling Giganteum, will be launched later.