UL-Lafayette Launches Communications Satellite theadvocate/news/acadiana/7628915-123/ul-lafayette-launches-communications-satellite NASA, UL-Lafayette team for second satellite project By Billy Gunn bgunn@theadvocate November 20, 2013 ______________ LAFAYETTE — A NASA Minotaur I rocket blasted off from a launch pad in Virginia at 7:13 p.m. Tuesday, carrying the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s communications satellite into orbit, the second space payload in six years for the university. A group of 30 that included UL-Lafayette engineering professors and engineering students counted down from 10 and let out a loud cheer as the rocket left the launch pad. Watching the liftoff on a big screen in Madison Hall, which houses the college’s engineering departments, student Sabrina Bradley-Powell let out panicked cry when the burst of light from ignition came. “I thought it blew up,” she said, relieved to see the fire from the rockets’ tail grow fainter as it flew higher. The next step was making contact later Tuesday night with the satellite as it rounded Earth’s orbit and flew over Lafayette. On board the unmanned Minotaur rocket was the Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experiment, the UL-Lafayette engineering team’s communications satellite. At 2.2 pounds, CAPE-2 is smaller than a football and built in the shape of a cube. Its journey from concept to Earth’s orbit took 10 years, during which UL-Lafayette built and launched CAPE-1 into space in 2007, and started working on CAPE-2. NASA’s launch of CAPE-2 placed UL-Lafayette in elite company as one of only a handful of universities in the world that have had an engineering department build two satellites for work in space. Louis Courville, an electrical engineering major from New Iberia, was project manager for CAPE-2. He said students on the team poured hundreds of hours to get the satellite ready for flight and a useful life in space. A UL-Lafayette team of five traveled Monday to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to witness the launch of the rocket that would carry payloads including CAPE-2. Other members of the UL-Lafayette team stayed behind. Their mission was to stay in Madison Hall and activate CAPE-2’s communications system once it was in orbit, Courville said. It was UL-Lafayette’s second space venture after launching CAPE-1 in 2007 from a site in Russia. CAPE-1 was a minimally designed satellite, the chief accomplishment was to give engineering students a chance to work on a space-bound satellite, professor Robert Henry said at the time of the launch. Henry, who remains a professor at UL-Lafayette, left the group Tuesday before liftoff. In 2007, Henry, who was the faculty adviser for the CAPE-1 project, predicted that the next satellite would provide more uses, such as reading data from buoys in the Gulf of Mexico. Paul Darby, the faculty adviser for CAPE-2, said Tuesday the students did program the satellite to read data from Gulf buoys as well as other functions. According to the university, CAPE-2 can relay tweets, email, voice messages from Earth-bound radio stations to listeners across the world, and convert text to speech. CAPE-2 was one of 11 picked by NASA for the space agency’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites mission, designed to put inexpensive satellites into space and promote technology. “These guys (students) put in a lot of work,” Darby said. The team included UL-Lafayette faculty and sciences majors in electrical and mechanical engineering and computer science.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 19:10:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015