Students at Sonoma State are involved in building and launching a small satellite – CubeSat, which is the size of three 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm cubes – into space to collect data as part of NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) Student Collaboration Project.
Total funding of $1,125,677 for the project has been awarded to grant Principal Investigator Laura Peticolas, Associate Director of SSU’s EdEon STEM Learning Center, and SSU Professor Lynn Cominsky, EdEon’s Director.
The IMAP Student Collaboration (StC) is a program developed through the University of New Hampshire, Howard University, and Sonoma State that provides students – including those traditionally underrepresented or underserved in STEM – with hands-on experience designing, building, testing, and calibrating scientific instruments. One CubeSat is being built at each institution.
At Sonoma State, Peticolas has for the past three years been managing an evolving team of students who bring their field expertise to the mission.
"It has been impressive to watch students apply what they have learned and gain new knowledge in engineering, computer science, and physics as they develop and test a robust CubeSat system – including our very own SSU Ground Station," Peticolas said.
This summer, the group included two students from Santa Rosa Junior College and Mendocino College, through the Engaging Community Colleges in Collaboration (EC3) program. Through EC3, community college students from the partner schools engage in projects and research at Sonoma State during the summer.
"This is one of the most challenging and potentially transformative collaborative projects that I have been involved in,” Peticolas said. “We are teaching students from three very different institutions and from different backgrounds to build and test hardware and software used by professionals across the country.”
Their CubeSat’s mission? To better understand how and why solar storms affect satellite drag in the magnetic and Northern Lights (auroral) cusp region. The group is working with the CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) to get the satellite up and into that orbit.
"CSLI will find us a ride into space,” said 2024 SSU graduate Erika Diaz Ramirez, the CubeSat Student Lead who has worked on the project since 2021.
“We give parameters – such as a polar orbit, time frame related to our science, and a specific height to launch into – and they give us a date and the rocket from which the CubeSat will be launched that matches them as closely as possible,” she said.
The University of New Hampshire leads the IMAP Student Collaboration project. Princeton University professor David J. McComas leads the IMAP mission with an international team of 24 partner institutions.
The information contained in this document is based upon work supported by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant awarded to the University System of New Hampshire and subawarded to SSU, grant number 80NSSC20K1110. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASA.