WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 (PNA/Xinhua) — A privately-owned U.S. rocket that carries a record 29 satellites, including one developed by high school students, blasted into space on Tuesday night, NASA TV showed.
The Minotaur rocket, developed and flown by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., was launched at 08:15 p.m. EDT (0115 GMT Wednesday) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport located at the U.S. space agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia.
The primary purpose is to launch the Space Test Program Satellite-3 known as STPSat-3, as part of the U.S. Air force’s Operationally Responsive Space program that has previously flown experimental payloads to space to demonstrate new technologies.
The rocket will also deploy a record-setting 28 tiny satellites known as cubesats including TJ3Sat, which was built and tested by students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia.
TJ3Sat is the first satellite to be built and tested by high school students, according to Orbital Sciences, which supported the project.
The cube-shaped satellite measures approximately 3.9×3.9×4.5 inches (10x10x12 centimeters) and has a mass of about 2.0 pounds (0.89 kilograms), it said.
The satellite contains a phonetic voice synthesizer, which can convert strings of text to voice and transmit it back to Earth over amateur radio frequencies.
Students from around the world can submit text strings to be uploaded to the satellite for transmission, Orbital Sciences said. The satellite’s design and operations data is public, enabling students from other countries to use it freely.
“It used to be that kids growing up wanted to be an astronaut,” Andrew Petro, program executive for small spacecraft technology at NASA, said in a statement. “I think we might be seeing kids saying, what they want to do is build a spacecraft. The idea here is that they really can do that.”
Also included in the cubesats is NASA’s smartphone-controlled small spacecraft called PhoneSat 2.4. NASA launched three other PhoneSats in April but the trio were short-lived, operating for about a week in orbit.
The three PhoneSats signaled “the first baby step,” Bruce Yost, program manager for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program at the Ames Research Center said.
“The PhoneSat 2.4 will be at a higher altitude and stay in space for a couple of years before reentering,” Yost added. “So we’ll be able to start collecting data on the radiation effects on the satellite and see if we run into anything that causes problems.”
Among the other small satellites is a cubesat called Firefly, which will study the relationship between lightning and Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes. There’s also the Vermont Lunar CubeSat, which aims to help develop the prototype technologies for a smartphone-powered satellite that could be launched to the moon in the future.
Two days later, Russia is expected to launch a Dnepr rocket to deliver a total of 32 satellites of various sizes to orbit. (PNA/Xinhua)