Cornell University Satellite

The Cornell University Satellite (CUSat) project is a multi-year effort to design, build, and launch an end-to-end autonomous on orbit inspection system. The CUSat system will demonstrate a process through which one satellite can diagnose the structural health and configuration of another; a capability that will benefit commercial, government, and manned space missions envisioned for the coming decades. The space segment consists of two functionally identical satellites that will launch together and separate on orbit in a target-inspector configuration. Once in orbit, CUSat will use microthrust Pulsed Plasma Thrusters (PPTs) and sub-centimeter level accurate Carrier-phase Differential GPS (CDGPS) to navigate the satellites to within ten meters of each other. The inspector satellite will use cameras to gather imagery of the target satellite while performing relative navigation. Target satellite imagery will be transferred to the ground segment where they will be used to reconstruct a three dimensional model for the end user.

CUSat was the winner of the University Nanosat-4 Program which aims to educate the future aerospace workforce and develop new space technologies. As part of this program, CUSat completed environmental testing and other aspects of final I&T in the AFRL Aerospace Engineering Facility at Kirtland Air Force Base. CUSat is working with AFRL to complete the Department of Defense SERB process in preparation for a launch with the Space Test Program.

Famous quotes containing the words university and/or satellite:

    His role was as the gentle teacher, the logical, compassionate, caring and articulate teacher, who inspired you so that you wanted to please him more than life itself.
    Carol Lawrence, U.S. singer, star of West Side Story. Conversations About Bernstein, p. 172, ed. William Westbrook Burton, Oxford University Press (1995)

    Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)