Merritt Island High School Mission Selected for NASA Cubesat Launch Initiative

MIHS_Team
Photo of the combined MIHS, Cal Poly, and NASA teams as they did their first integrated testing of the StangSat satellite at Kennedy Space Center.

Information Week published news of the Merritt Island High School team who developed StangSat.

The fourth round of selections in NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative also included a team of high school students at the Merritt Island High School in Brevard County, Florida. They plan to build a cubesat containing two accelerometers to measure the amount of vibration in the Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD case that holds the cubesats during launch and then deploys them.

The high school is partnering with students at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. The Cal-Poly CubeSat, dubbed CP9, is actually two cubes that contain accelerometers, plus a radio to transmit data back to Earth for the high school students to analyze. The Merritt Island High School cubesat, named StangSat, will stream data to the CP9 in real time during the launch using Wi-Fi.

“We’re going to be demonstrating that wireless transmissions inside the P-POD aren’t going to harm the launch,” said Adam Darley, a senior at Cal-Poly who is serving as the CP9 project manager. “If we can demonstrate that, then it will act as a platform to being able to stream information without a radio link.”

The Merritt Island High School Cubesat team has more information and photos posted on their Facebook page.