With European collaboration at the core of COMCUBE-S, Mony Aramalla explores Ireland’s growing role in addressing some of the universe’s deepest mysteries.
The universe produces fireworks and they make anything we’ve seen on Earth look tame. We’re talking about gamma-ray bursts—colossal cosmic explosions that release more energy in a few seconds than the Sun will produce over its entire lifetime. And now, University College Dublin’s Centre for Space Research (UCD C-Space) is taking on a challenge to chase these cosmic blasts in a unique way.
Discovered almost six decades ago, gamma ray bursts have remained largely unresearched. They appear without warning, last only seconds to minutes, and vanish before most telescopes can even spring into position. Astronomers and scientists believe gamma ray bursts are linked to catastrophic events like the collapse of massive stars or the collisions of neutron stars.
Catching gamma ray bursts in the act is a lot like trying to photograph lightning during a storm. You can’t just wait with your camera pointed in one direction. You need multiple eyes on the sky, ready to snap the shot from different angles, at exactly the right moment. That’s where COMCUBE-S comes in.
Thanks to funding from the European Space Agency (ESA), UCD will lead COMCUBE-S, a mission that uses swarms of small satellites called CubeSats, to capture these gamma-ray bursts in action.
Having this mission in the form of a swarm is vital. When gamma ray bursts happen, they are blink-and-you-miss-it events, lasting just seconds. A single satellite can not look everywhere at once, but with a swarm of CubeSats working together, the entire perimeter can be captured. By combining the data from this swarm, scientists can measure the polarisation of these bursts—how the light is oriented. That detail can unlock the mystery of how these powerful bursts actually form.
As the project lead Dr David Murphy explains:
“Pooling together data from the many satellites in the swarm will improve performance, while the multi-point observations ensure we see all of the sky, all of the time.”
In other words, nothing can escape the eyes of the swarm.
This venture is no small feat for Ireland’s space research. UCD’s researchers and students already made history with EIRSAT-1 last year, the country’s first satellite, which carried a gamma-ray detector into orbit. That success proved the concept that a tiny spacecraft could study giant cosmic phenomena. Now COMCUBE-S is accompanying EIRSAT-1 in furthering space research coming from Ireland.
However, UCD is not alone in this journey. They are leading a group involving many European labs and experts including: AAC Clyde Space (Scotland), the Laboratoire de Physique des 2 Infinis Irène Joliot-Curie (France), Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternative (France), Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Sweden). With this collaboration, the team is running a Phase A study which is the mission’s feasibility study. If it passes, COMCUBE-S could evolve into a full collection of CubeSats chasing cosmic fireworks across the universe.
The development of the COMCUBE-S was possible because of the SysNova Challenge: Innovative Mission Concepts Enabled by Swarms of CubeSats held by the ESA. In April 2024, this challenge was held at ESA’s technical centre ESTEC, bringing together more than 30 teams across Europe pitching their ideas.
As one of the winners of this challenge, the team is currently working on the technical details, hounding the science case, and designing the blueprints for how the swarm would work in orbit. By the end of 2025, ESA will decide whether to push the project to the next stage of development. If this project is successful, the mission could eventually launch a full CubeSat constellation into orbit. The gamma ray bursts that have been baffling scientists for years will now be detected and analysed.
Solving this astronomical puzzle is important, but this project goes to show something bigger: the power of CubeSat swarms. Traditionally, space engineering has relied on massive, expensive spacecraft. CubeSats, by contrast, are fast and affordable.
COMCUBE-S’s success could pave a way for a new era where small fleets of satellites could tackle many mysteries—from studying black holes to monitoring Earth’s climate. For Ireland, projects like the COMCUBE-S and EIRSAT-1 buy us a seat at the table of European space innovation.
COMCUBE-S is more than just a mission. It’s testament to the fact that Ireland, together with its European partners, can lead the charge in tackling some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Space research doesn’t have to be limited to the big players anymore, and it’s a reminder that when scientists. engineers, universities, and organisations across borders put their minds together, we can build the tools that can discover the universe’s biggest mysteries that we once thought impossible.
The universe may keep throwing out the most elaborate fireworks, but thanks to COMCUBE-S, we will be ready to capture them, satellites watching, finally getting the opportunity to understand how the most powerful explosions in existence come to be.