While all eyes have been on NASA's Artemis II, which launched April 1 to fly four astronauts around the moon, dozens of current and former University of Cincinnati students have been focused on another launch scheduled for April 8.
A satellite slightly bigger than a Rubik's Cube will blast into space aboard NASA’s Northrop Grumman CRS-24 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station.
"We are the first student-led satellite organization to create a cube satellite in the state of Ohio, and the first satellite ever made by the University of Cincinnati," explains UC CubeCats President Nathan Nguyen.
Nguyen and around 30 other current and former club members are traveling to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch the launch.
"I'm honestly ecstatic," Nguyen tells WVXU. "It has been a decade in the process of doing this project and having generations of CubeCats members come together and create a satellite that is functioning and is working as we are hoping to, and sending it off to NASA has been such an experience."
CubeCats is a UC student organization founded in 2015 to design, build and operate flight-ready spacecraft systems. In 2018, NASA accepted the group's Project Leopard into its CubeSat Launch Initiative.
Over the years, around 120 students created a roughly Rubik's Cube-sized satellite — 10cm x 10cm x 10cm — that will test if a thin carbon sheeting can block radiation effectively. That's important because if NASA wants to get to Mars, it needs a material that can protect astronauts from radiation during the long trip.
"We're trying to see how well this material will protect humans in space against all these different kinds of radiation," Sam Kohls, program manager of CubeCats, and a senior majoring in mechanical engineering technology told WVXU earlier this year. "There's a lot of different types, but what we're trying to do is, there is a radiation that typically is blocked by things like water and lead. Those materials are really heavy and hard to get to space. With our material, it's very, very light, so we hope we're able to take some of the weight from those materials and replace it with our lightweight material."
The students officially handed the satellite — known as LeopardSat-1 — over to NASA in January, and have been eagerly awaiting the launch.
"All of it is in NASA's hands," Nyugen says. "Our only job now is to sit there and watch in amazement as it finally launches and see all of our hard work come to fruition."
You can see a replica of the LeopardSat-1 satellite on display at the Cincinnati Observatory through April 7.
UC CubeCats aren't done. The student group already is working on its next satellite, HabSat-1, which will be used to study harmful algal blooms on the Great Lakes.
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