The magazine Nature echoes the project of an enterprising student of the URJC

Julián Fernández, a student at the Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSIT), is co-founder of the technology-based company Fossa Systems and is creating a network of low-cost picosatellites to provide affordable connectivity to the Internet of things.

Abel Verard / Editorial

Julián Fernández is a student in the first year of the Degree in Telecommunications Technology Engineering. At just 19 years old, he has managed to get the prestigious scientific journal Nature I dedicated it a review. This has been thanks to the creation of Fossa Systems, a company whose business model is based on providing affordable connectivity from picosatellites in low orbit to track and control data from its assets in real time.

The goal is for companies to be able to collect, for example, the GPS location of their livestock or the temperature of a shipping container in the ocean, even when the monitored objects are in remote areas without easy internet access.

Julián's interest in this technology arose when he was only 12 years old, when he began looking for opportunities to work with hardware, both inside and outside of school, feeling fascinated by the Internet of Things (IoT, for its acronym in English Internet of Things): the devices, machines and objects that exchange data over the Internet and other communication networks.

Later, his interest focused on using low-cost picosatellites to increase connectivity in places with difficult Internet access. He decided to design and build the picosatellites himself and find a way to launch them into space cheaply, as a means of providing affordable connectivity to society. Along the way, when he was 15 years old he expressed on the online forum Reddit his motivation for pursuing this goal.

Thanks to Reddit he met people with the same interests as him. In this way, in 2018 he organized himself with like-minded people and, in December 2019, they launched their first communications picosatellite in orbit, Fossa Sat 1, weighing just 250 grams.

He then found a partner with whom he founded Fossa Systems in Madrid, a company whose clients include agricultural companies, shipping companies, etc. Thanks to this technology, the data of your assets can be shared in real time, allowing the monitoring of your assets in remote locations.

The company has already launched the first 13 commercial picosatellites, with a goal of reaching 80 satellites launched by 2024. Picosatellites are deployed in very low Earth orbit, disintegrating as they fall through the atmosphere every 2-3 years, instead of to remain in orbit and generate space debris.

Now Julián has a clear goal: to make space connectivity accessible to everyone in the next 5 years.