Copy of Six Students. One Tiny Satellite. Zero Prior Experience.
- May 3
- 3 min read
Every Friday evening, while most of our classmates are probably watching something on Netflix or heading out, six of us are cramped around a table somewhere in Luxembourg arguing about parachutes, soldering irons, and whether PLA or PETG is the better choice for a satellite chassis. This is the story of Team Icarus 6, and honestly, we still cannot quite believe it is real.
We are a group of high school students from three different schools in Luxembourg: the Athénée de Luxembourg, the Michel Rodange, and the European School. None of us knew each other particularly well before this project started. None of us had built a satellite before. And none of us had any idea just how much a simple engineering challenge could consume your entire brain for months on end. But here we are, and we would not trade it for anything.
“We named our project Ikarus, and we are very aware of what happened to the original one. Hopefully we land a little more gracefully.” — Team Icarus 6 |
The team came together through the CanSat competition, organized in Luxembourg by ESERO. For those who do not know what CanSat is yet, the short version is this: you build a fully functional satellite that fits inside the volume of a standard soda can, it gets launched to about a kilometer in altitude, and then it has to survive the fall and send back data in real time. It sounds insane. It is a little insane. But it is also the most exciting thing any of us have ever worked on.
The Team
DOCUMENTATION & SECONDARY MISSION David Jonas 11th grade, Athénée de Luxembourg. David keeps everything documented and leads the secondary mission electronics. He is also the reason the cross parachute prototype even exists. | OUTREACH & RADIO COMMUNICATION Dennis Stephen Belo Alvarenga 11th grade, Athénée de Luxembourg. Dennis handles social media and is one of the key people behind getting the radio communication system to work. He is the most enthusiastic person in any room at any given moment. |
PROGRAMMING & ELECTRONICS Emeline Buck 12th grade, Michel Rodange. The only 12th grader on the team and largely responsible for the code that makes the CanSat function. When the primary mission started transmitting data, that was mostly Emeline. | PARACHUTE DESIGN László Bán 11th grade, Athénée de Luxembourg. László spent months thinking about aerodynamics, gore geometry, and spill holes. He is the reason the hemispherical parachute opens correctly. |
RADIO COMMUNICATION Luca Moldovan 11th grade, Athénée de Luxembourg. Working alongside Dennis, Luca helped build the radio link between the CanSat and the ground station. Getting a signal back from a falling satellite is harder than it sounds. | 3D DESIGN Luka Takki 11th grade, European School of Luxembourg. Luka designed the physical body of the CanSat from scratch in Onshape. The thing has gone through three complete redesigns. He is also writing an article about all of this for the school journal. |
The thing about working in a team like this is that everyone’s role sounds clean and separate on paper, but in reality it is completely blurred. Luka designed the chassis, but then realized the vents needed to be a specific size for the CO2 sensor Emeline was integrating. Emeline wrote the primary mission code but needed to understand the radio hardware that Dennis and Luca were testing. David was documenting everything but also ended up neck-deep in secondary mission electronics. Engineering, it turns out, is one giant conversation.
We meet every Friday from 6pm to 8pm in person, and do extra hybrid sessions whenever someone’s schedule allows. We have a group chat that never sleeps. We have had moments of genuine panic, like the radio transmission bug that appeared right before a deadline, and moments of genuine joy, like the first time the Yagi antenna received a live data packet, which honestly felt like magic.
“The first time we saw real measurements appearing on screen, transmitted wirelessly from our own satellite to our own ground station, there was a moment of silence and then everyone started shouting at once.” — Team Icarus 6, after the first successful transmission test |
Follow our journey on Instagram at @icarus6_cansat where we post updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and the occasional catastrophe. We are building something real. Come watch.
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