Mission

• The Program was funded in 2014 by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
• The program is administered by Dr. John Morrison – UNCW.
• NASA provided “advice and review” during the development phase and with formal NASA/HQ Space Act Agreement (2017), will provide services for the collection, processing, calibration, validation, archive and distribution of the data.
• A second Moore Foundation grant was awarded in 2017 to provide the funds for another commercial launch for the second CubeSAT and operations of both spacecraft and instruments for a duration of 2 years each.
• In 2021, the University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography joint the team, Dr. Sara Rivero-Calle's team will be co-leading the Science Program and Mission Management.

1. Launched December 3rd 2018
2. Nominal orbital height = 575 km
3. Sun-synchronous around 10:30am
4. 9-day repeat orbit
5. Baseline orbital lifetime of 1 year (18-24 month)
6. Baseline of 15 scenes per day (200 x 600km of approximately 120 meter resolution - 100MB/scene)
7. X-band downlink (Wallops & Alaska) data rate of 6 --> 100mbps
8. Weight of instrument less than 1 kilogram
9. Total weight of spacecraft plus instrument less than 5 kilograms
10. Off-the-shelf CCD arrays used
11. Sensitivity comparable to SeaWiFS
12. Open intellectual property and knowledge sharing

Project Partners

• Cloudland Instruments
• AAC Clyde Space
• NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Spaceflight
• UGA Skidaway Institute of Oceanography

Helpful UNCW Links

• Center for Marine Science
• Physics and Physical Oceanography

Helpful CubeSAT Links

• CubeSAT
• CubeSAT Design Specification
• CubeSAT NASA
• NASA CubeSAT Launch Initiative
• CubeSAT Kit