University’s mini-satellite zipping around Earth

LAFAYETTE, La. — A cubical satellite small enough to sit on the palm of your hand is zipping around the world and sending data about radiation to the Louisiana students who designed and built it.

The satellite, called CAPE-3, carries a chip designed and built by students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to detect radiation, with an eye to keeping astronauts safe.

“The detectors would provide liquid crystal display readings so astronauts could constantly monitor how much radiation they’re being exposed to,” Dr. Paul Darby, the university’s project leader, said in a news release.

The satellite also carries a tiny Geiger counter so students can tell whether the chip is accurate.

Each side of the satellite is only 10 centimeters — less than 4 inches — across. It was among 10 launched Jan. 17 from a Virgin Orbit rocket that itself was launched high above the Pacific Ocean from a customized Boeing 747.

Eight of the other nine were built by students at other schools. The 10th was built by NASA, which runs the CubeSat Launch Initiative to give nonprofit organizations and schools at all levels a chance to do scientific investigations in space and help NASA with exploration and technology development. At least one “nanosatellite” was built by an elementary school.

Students in Lafayette began receiving radio signals early Monday from the satellite, which circles the world every 90 minutes, at 17,000 miles an hour.

This is Louisiana Lafayette’s third satellite launched as part of the program. The school’s program is called CAPE, for the Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experiment program aimed at preparing students for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The CAPE-1 satellite was built to show that the student team could design and build a satellite that could send radio signals back and could respond to signals sent from Earth. It was monitored for four months after its launch in 2007.

CAPE-2, launched in 2013, had fold-out solar panels, a text-to-speech transmitter and a “parrot repeater” that could record audio from Earth and broadcast it back to the sender. Another feature lets visitors to a children’s museum hear their own voices coming back on a radio and send text messages to the satellite. It was monitored for 11 months.