Northwest Aerospace News August | September Issue No. 10 | Page 30

A
freshman by the name of Basquiat Nelson is the
logistics and ground stations lead, “I take care of logistics
for business cards, shirts, and tracking the satellite.” He
likes attending local events and informing people about the
DaVinci program. He feels their school was chosen for being
hardworking, and said, “Even with postponements we kept
pushing forward.”
Long-term they want to start taking photos with the satellite,
which hasn’t been available to date.
The students in the program are more than astute; they seem
to be inherently curious. They will continue to run the pro-
gram for about two more years until the satellite “enters the
atmosphere and burns up in space,” said Justin Kugler.
While the brunt of focus is on satellite management and
fulfilling their mission of connecting with students around the
world from space, these students are picking up communica-
tion and leadership skills that will solidly take them into the
future, whether terrestrial or within the realm of space travel.
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NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS
What is a CubeSat?
A CubeSat (U-class spacecraft) is a type of miniaturized
satellite for space research that is made up of multiples of
10 cm × 10 cm × 11.35 cm (about 4 × 4 × 4.5 inches) cubic
units. CubeSats have a mass of no more than 1.33 kilograms
(2.9 pounds) per unit, and often use commercial off-the-
shelf (COTS) components for their electronics and structure.
CubeSats are commonly put in orbit by deployers on the Inter-
national Space Station or launched as secondary payloads on
a launch vehicle. Over 1000 CubeSats have been launched as
of January 2019. Over 900 have been successfully deployed
in orbit and over 80 have been destroyed in launch failures.
(Reference: Wikipedia, 2019)
Project DaVinci Cube Satellite
https://www.projectdavincicubesat.org