• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured
  • More News ⌄
    • SatNews
    • SatMagazine
    • MilSatMagazine
  • Events ⌄
    • MilSat Symposium
    • SmallSat Symposium
    • Satellite Innovation
  • Contacts
  • SUBSCRIPTION

SmallSat News

You are here: Home / News / University Of Louisiana-Lafayette Students Receive Signals From Their Launched CAPE-3 Smallsat

University Of Louisiana-Lafayette Students Receive Signals From Their Launched CAPE-3 Smallsat

January 25, 2021 by editorial

A cubesat called CAPE-3 is carrying a chip designed and built by students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to detect radiation, all with keeping an eye on astronaut safety. The satellite also carries a tiny Geiger counter so students can tell whether the chip is accurate.

Each side of the satellite is 10 centimeters across and this smallsat was among 10 that were launched on January 17 from a Virgin Orbit rocket that was launched high above the Pacific Ocean from a customized Boeing 747.

Eight of the other nine smallsats were built by students at other schools. The tenth was built by NASA, which runs the CubeSat Launch Initiative to give nonprofit organizations and schools at all levels a chance to do scientific investigations in space and help NASA with exploration and technology development. At least one of these smallsats was built by an elementary school.

Students in Lafayette began receiving radio signals early on Monday, January 18, from the satellite, which circles the world every 90 minutes at 17,000 miles an hour.

This is Louisiana-Lafayette’s third satellite launched as part of the program. The school’s program is called CAPE, for the Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experiment program aimed at preparing students for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The CAPE-1 satellite was built to show that the student team could design and build a satellite that could send radio signals back and could respond to signals sent from Earth. It was monitored for four months after its launch in 2007.

CAPE-2, launched in 2013, had fold-out solar panels, a text-to-speech transmitter and a “parrot repeater” that could record audio from Earth and broadcast it back to the sender. Another feature lets visitors to a children’s museum hear their own voices coming back on a radio, as well as send text messages to the satellite. This smallsat was monitored for 11 months.

“The detectors would provide liquid crystal display readings so astronauts could constantly monitor how much radiation they’re being exposed to,” Dr. Paul Darby, the university’s project leader, said in a news release.

Rizwan Merchant, a NASA systems safety engineer who was assistant project manager for the CAPE-2 launch while a student at ULL and is now the CAPE team’s industry mentor, said students will spend a few weeks “grabbing data from the satellite simply to assesses every feature and ensure it’s all working properly.”

Then CAPE team members and students majoring in areas including computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and physics will begin collecting and analyzing the information.

Article source: Texarkana Gazette

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019

© 2019–2023 SatNews

x
Sign Up Now!

Enjoy a free weekly newsletter with recent headlines from the global SmallSat industry.

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Thanks for subscribing! You will now receive weekly SmallSat News updates.
We love our advertisers.
And you will too!

Please disable Ad Blocker to continue... We promise to keep it unobtrusive.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Thanks for subscribing! Please check your email for further instructions.