UGA CubeSat one step closer to space

Great news from NASA for students and faculty working diligently to design and build UGA's first satellite:

The University of Georgia CubeSat project is among 34 small satellites selected by NASA to fly as auxiliary payloads aboard missions planned to launch in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

The UGA project, led by a team of undergraduate students and including faculty from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering, performs multispectral analysis from low Earth orbit, in this case an altitude of 400 kilometers.

"When our project was selected in 2016 to design and build a small satellite called CubeSat under NASA's Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) program, the grant did not guarantee launch," said Deepak Mishra, associate professor of geography and faculty advisor to the UGA CubeSat group. "We recently received the news that UGA's CubeSat had been selected."

Very focused students, working to create something new for the university that will benefit other students and faculty for many years to come. This CubeSat is only part of their vision, which includes the ambition of one day building a space research center at UGA. Now that is truly out of this world. But the near-term monitoring capabilites of this project will be greatly useful for measuring ocean productivity off the Georgia coast. Great news, amazing work. UGA, you have lift-off.

Image: UGA research scientist David Cotten of the Center for Geospatial Research, left to right, senior computer science and astrophysics major Caleb Adams of Powder Springs, associate professor of geography Deepak Mishra, and senior mechanical engineering major Megan Le Corre of Peachtree City are working together along with a team of students and professors to design, build and deploy a cube satellite with NASA help. Adams is holding a 3-D printer model of the CubeSat. (Credit: Andrew Davis Tucker, University of Georgia)