Orbital to Launch First Satellite Designed and Built by High School Students

First Posted: Nov 13, 2013 05:48 PM EST
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Orbital Sciences Corporation will launch the first satellite designed and built by high school students into Earth orbit aboard a Minotaur I rocket next week.

The small satellite, known as TJCubeSat (TJSat), will be launched aboard the U.S. Air Force's ORS-3 mission as one of more than two dozen secondary payloads the Minotaur rocket will carry into orbit. The mission is scheduled to take place from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport located at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia. The launch is currently scheduled for Tuesday, November 19, 2013, at approximately 7:30 p.m. (EST).

The TJSat is a small-size CubeSat developed, built and tested by students from the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. Over the past several years, volunteers from Orbital's technical staff mentored the student team and provided engineering oversight, while the company made its space testing facilities available and provided financial support for the satellite project. TJSat was assigned to the ORS-3 mission launch through NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) program based on launch manifest availability.

The TJSat project was conceived as a method to interest students around the world in space-related science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. TJ3Sat utilizes the CubeSat standard design developed by Stanford University and California Polytechnic State University. The cube-shaped satellite measures approximately 10x10x12 centimeters and has a mass of about 2.0 pounds (0.89 kilograms).

The TJ3Sat's payload is a phonetic voice synthesizer that converts strings of text to voice. Once converted, the voice is transmitted back to Earth over amateur radio frequencies. Students from around the world can submit text strings to be uploaded to the satellite for transmission. The satellite's design and operations data is public, enabling students from other countries to use it freely.

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Source: News release. ©2015 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved.

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