NOVA-SAT is a graduation project developed by a group of students from the faculty together with the Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI). The project is dedicated to the memory of Capt. (res.) Denis Krokhmalov-Veksler, an IDF officer who was killed in January during the battles in the Gaza Strip.
Capt. (res.) Krokhmalov-Veksler lived in Be’er-Sheva and served as an officer in the Combat Engineering Corps. Despite an injury during triathlon training after his military service, Denis insisted on continuing to serve in the reserves. At the same time, he registered and was accepted to the faculty, eager to fulfill his dream of studying aeronautics and space engineering at the Technion.
Dr. Hillel Rubinstein from IAI leads the NOVA-SAT satellite project with Dr. Oded Golan, the academic supervisor for the students’ final projects. The satellite the students are developing is designed to carry a detector for measuring gamma radiation. PhD student Julia Saleh from the Faculty of Physics at the Technion built the detector. It is designed to detect bursts of gamma radiation—a product of exploding stars at the end of their lives, supernovae, and mergers of neutron star pairs.
The satellite’s name, “NOVA-SAT,” combines commemorating the October 7th events at the Nova Party with its primary scientific mission.
