The satellites will piggyback aboard a Stanford University-built 30-pound satellite called OPAL. The Orbiting Picosatellite Automated Launcher will serve as a mother ship, spitting out smaller devices provided by such giants as the Department of Defense and the Aerospace Corp. — as well as Santa Clara’s hockey pucks.
     The mission will see if small satellites equipped with tiny sensors can survive the rigors of space and do the work of much larger and more expensive vehicles.

Seniors Stepping Up
Research universities and graduate students routinely participate in space projects, but it’s unusual for undergraduates to have a lead role.
     The Santa Clara project began about a year ago, when students expressed an interest in building some sort of spacecraft.
     Kitts, who was finishing his work toward a doctorate in mechanical engineering with a specialty in satellite design at Stanford, was intrigued.
     He told the Santa Clara students to form teams and develop their ideas as team projects. One team ended up composed of all women, and they eventually won the competition. Kitts says it isn’t because it was an all-female effort.
     “We picked them because they deserved it,” he says, for putting together a well-balanced team and coming up with the best ideas.
     During the summer break, the team built a prototype of a satellite they hoped to launch into orbit, but some members seemed a little lacking in self-confidence.
     That evaporated during a presentation at NASA’s annual Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah.
     “The people at the conference just bowled them over,” Kitts says. “They said (the idea and the prototype) were just fantastic.”

Enlightening Research
The project consists of three satellites. The first will carry some sort of sensor to see if a tiny orbiter is viable for carrying small sensors into space.
     The other two satellites will carry out a scientific experiment.
     After they’re launched by the mother ship, the two will slowly drift apart. Each will carry a receiver to record radio waves in the ionosphere caused by lightning.
     The ionosphere is a poorly understood region in Earth’s upper atmosphere, and electromagnetic disturbances there can wreak havoc on communication satellites.
     The tiny satellites will “receive the same blast coming from the same stroke of lightning,” and transmit that data back to the ground, Kitts says. Since they’ll be separated, any differences in the signals will tell scientists something about the part of the ionosphere that the radio waves passed through.
     Kitts sees it as a small start in what could be a major project consisting of a fleet of tiny satellites that could warn ground controllers of approaching disturbances that might damage other satellites.
     That would be several years down the road and by then, the members of Santa Clara’s team will be seasoned veterans in space design — and won’t have to go to Radio Shack for parts.