Cal Poly CubeSat rides aboard the LauncherOne Virgin Orbit rocket on Wednesday morning on its second attempt at a place.
The CubeSat is one of 10 small satellites that NASA will introduce in its next Nanosatellites Education (ELaNa) mission.
The Virgin Orbit rocket will be propelled by a Boeing 747 to 35,000 feet before being released and fired into orbit.
That modified Boeing 747, dubbed “Cosmic Girl”, will depart from Mojave Air and Space Port between 7am and 10am on Wednesday morning, with additional launch windows through January if needed.
The Cal Poly CubeSat – about the size of a loaf of bread and known as ExoCube 2 – took several years to build with a group of 50 students.
“To accomplish the mission, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed a spectrometer, and the Cal Poly CubeSat Laboratory team was asked to design, develop, manufacture, assemble and test the supporting elements of the spacecraft system,” he said. Pauline Faure, Cal Poly aerospace assistant professor of engineering and CubeSat consultant, in a press release from the school Monday. “Structure, power system, communications, flight software, etc. The students certainly guided the performance of the project and they deserve the full credit of the incredible work they have achieved. ”
Once the CubeSat orbit is reached, a team of students will use the CubeSat Lab on the Cal Poly campus to download data from the spacecraft and share it with similar teams at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois.
NASA selected and supported Cal Poly and other college programs through the organization’s CubeSat Launch Campaign.
Small satellites like the ExoCube 2 are low-cost ways to conduct scientific studies and technology demonstrations in space.
Cal Poly’s latest ELaNa satellite, the Launch Environment Observer, was launched in June 2019 aboard the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.