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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Private Missions _ First CubeSat built by high school students

Posted by: jekbradbury May 11 2011, 12:28 AM

I'm a few months behind on this (outreach isn't just an issue for the big guys...) and heard about it first in the school newspaper (though I've been waiting for this sort of confirmation for a few years now):

NASA has approved a CubeSat built by my high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for a spot on the Spring 2012 CRS-2 SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. As far as I know, this will represent the first time high school students have built and orbited their own satellite. I had no part in this project, which has been the work of a constantly-cycling team of seniors since 2006, but I know many of the people who worked on it over the years and have seen the dozens of circuit board revisions and hundreds of pages of design documentation--all for a satellite which you can hold in the palm of your hand. Its payload is a little text-to-speech synthesizer chip, which will broadcast over ham-radio frequencies spoken versions of messages sent in on a public website.

All of this, by the way, was made possible by a very generous grant and continued technical assistance from Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The NASA press release is http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/feb/HQ_11-038_CubeSat.htmlhttp://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/feb/HQ_11-038_CubeSat.html, and another article is http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/nasa-to-launch-the-first-satellites-built-by-high-school-students?click=main_sr.

Posted by: nprev May 11 2011, 12:35 AM

Applause!!! VERY impressive, and best of luck!

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