A group of UGA students and professors have designed two satellites that are going to be sent into space.
It’s a specific type of satellite that the UGA group of mostly undergraduate students, and a few graduate students, have developed, called a CubeSat. David Cotten is the lab supervisor of UGA’s Small Satellite Research Laboratory.
“A CubeSat is a special class of small satellite. And it’s basically ten centimeters by ten centimeters by ten centimeters, so a ten centimeter cube,” said Cotten.
After winning a satellite competition from the Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as NASA funding, the two CubeSats will be shipped up to the International Space Station along with other supplies for the astronauts.
“And the astronuats are going to be put it into a special deployer that are designed specifically for CubeSats and launch them into space,” said Cotten.
One CubeSat is going to image the coastal regions of Georgia and around the world to determine plant health and growth rates. The other will take images of the Earth and construct 3-D models.
The NASA-funded CubeSat is scheduled to be launched in 2019, and the Air Force Research Lab-funded CubeSat will launch in 2020.