A team of UChicago undergraduates is building a communications satellite smaller than a paper towel roll that will be launched into orbit courtesy of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative.
While large satellites like the Hubble Space Telescope are the size of a bus and even “SmallSats” are the size of a refrigerator, CubeSats are a class of nanosatellites that can be as tiny as a 10-centimeter cube (roughly four inches).
Big science can come from these small devices. The UChicago team’s PULSE-A (Polarization modUlated Laser Satellite Experiment) CubeSat aims to make space-to-ground operations more difficult to intercept and jam, while increasing the speed of communications.
“The project that we settled on was building a 10 megabit-per-second space to earth laser downlink,” said PULSE-A Project Director Lauren Ayala, a Molecular Engineering and Astrophysics fourth-year. “We want to take a signal on the satellite and then send it to an optical ground station on the Earth.”
PULSE-A was designed and will be built by a group of 53 University of Chicago undergraduates from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, the Physics Department, the Computer Science Department and the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
To read more, follow the link to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering website here.
