When Andrew Mann interviewed for his job as an astronomy professor at UNC-Chapel Hill a year ago, he told the hiring committee he wanted to buy a satellite to send on space missions.
“No, no, no,” they told him. “Don’t buy one. Build one.”
It was an intriguing idea. A satellite for a large-scale mission can easily cost $200 million to buy and launch. Instead, the department promised a team of University-based physicists, astronomers and engineers who could support Mann in building his own miniature satellites on campus, all for less than $10,000.
“They were really excited about the whole thing, and that kept me interested,” said Mann, an assistant professor in the College of Arts & Sciences’ physics and astronomy department. “But I’ve never built things made for space before, and I was sort of like, ‘What do I need? What do I do?’”
Mann’s colleagues jumped in to help, and rising senior Patrick Gorman volunteered his engineering prowess to create a prototype of a small satellite called a CubeSat.
“We’ve been using the 3D printers in the makerspaces to pull out prototypes of what we want to build,” said Gorman, a biomedical engineering and astronomy student who leads a campus organization called UNC Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. “It’s been an awesome on-campus resource for us.”
CubeSats, which Gorman calls “the next big space thing,” are hardly bigger than a Rubik’s cube at their smallest and weigh less than three pounds, making them relatively inexpensive to produce. Although they aren’t as advanced as other, pricier research spacecraft, Mann said they have the potential to be nearly as good.
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| UNC-CH