HANS

This project is realized with and by the CubeSat Lab at Smart Sensors Group.

HANS is the autonomous aurora hunter flying on our first CubeSat. It captures northern lights imagery, judges each frame onboard, and prioritizes the data that matters most for downlink.

Our aurora payload uses a wide-field camera paired with onboard processing to decide when conditions match science criteria and which images deserve precious downlink time. By filtering and ranking data in orbit, HANS squeezes maximum value out of every watt and byte.

We are also collaborating with the Department for Extraterrestial Physics at Kiel University, which is developing GRETEL (Galactic Radiation high-Energy Telescope), a heavy-ion Bismuth Germanate scintillator. The Kiel team has a long heritage of building similar detectors for missions to the Sun, Moon, and Mars.

Together, HANS and GRETEL showcase space engineering from Northern Germany.