Student and amateur CubeSat news roundup – Nov.17.2019

A sampling of recent articles, press releases, etc. related to student and amateur CubeSat / SmallSat projects and programs (find previous smallsat roundups here):

** EdgeCube to go to ISS on SpaceX Cargo Dragon in December. The cubesat, built by a collaboration of student teams at Sonoma State, Santa Clara Univ., and Morehead State Univ. in Kentucky, will be deployed into orbit from the ISS in January: Cube satellite built by SSU students set to orbit the Earth – The Community Voice

Sonoma State received funding for EdgeCube in June 2016, after physics and astronomy professor Lynn Cominsky wrote a proposal to NASA. The proposal called for monitoring the “red edge” of the chlorophyll spectrum in large patches of homogeneous vegetation using a CubeSat or a small satellite. Since then, approximately 30 students have worked on the project from Sonoma State, Santa Clara University and Morehead State. Professor Matt Clark from SSU’s Department of Geography and Environmental Planning was the originator of the idea to measure the “red edge,” hence the name “EdgeCube”.

More at Edgecube – sonoma state university ~ Santa clara university ~ Morehead State university.

EdgeCube components view. From FCC application (pdf)

** Virginia Tech inspireFly team wins SEDS SAT-2 contest. SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), Astranis, and NanoRacks sponsored the competition. The winning team will receive a free ride to the ISS for their CubeSat, which will then be deployed into orbit.

From the SEDS announcement:

Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), the largest student-run space and science advocacy organization in the world, today announced that Virginia Tech’s inspireFly team is the winner of the Astranis SEDS SAT-2 competition. Astranis, a manufacturer and operator of small geostationary satellites, contributed to the cost of the launch, while competition co-sponsor Nanoracks, a leading provider of commercial access to space, will launch and deploy the winning CubeSat on the International Space Station in the next two to three years.

Open to U.S. SEDS chapters, the competition tasked teams with submitting a design for a novel 1U CubeSat. The competition kicked off at SpaceVision in November 2018, where interested teams had the opportunity to attend an Astranis/Nanoracks workshop on designing, building, and integrating a CubeSat for low Earth orbit.

Thirteen chapters from across the country entered the competition and submitted proposals. The judging panel included members of the SEDS-USA Board of Advisors and Directors, as well as employees from Astranis and Nanoracks. Proposals were judged on their technical merits, the non-technical capabilities of the team to develop and support the design, the professionalism of proposal, the novelty of the proposed CubeSat mission, and the demographic makeup of the design team and their mentors.

Virginia Tech’s team was selected as the winner for its ContentCube project, a selfie-stick for space that will take pictures of an external LCD screen–featuring publicly-submitted photos–with Earth in the background.