A team of Warwick engineering students will be launching their own satellite 100km into space from the Swedish National Space Centre in March 2015. Incredibly the student team are not only designing the satellite, the electronics, communications and sensor systems for it but also they will be building it themselves.

The third and fourth-year engineering students beat off stiff competition from undergraduate, post-graduate and PhD teams from all over Europe to be selected among the nine student projects to be taken into space by a European Space Agency (ESA) rocket in 2015. Engineering team member Chris Hanbury-Williams said:

Now we’ve been selected, our work has only just started. We have to design and build the satellite and all its electronic and communication systems – no mean feat seeing as the final satellite will measure just a few centimetres. But we’re all hugely excited about the launch as it’s not every day you get to take part in a space mission."

For the 2015 launch, WUSAT will carry an experiment suggested by a team of physicists at Warwick who hunt for planets outside our solar system and analyse their atmospheres. The satellite will be carrying a simple way of looking at gases such as oxygen and sodium by measuring the brightness of sunlight at some very specific colours and at different heights as the satellite falls back to Earth. This kind of data is useful in studying planets that are outside our solar system (known as exoplanets) as it will help astronomers better understand the composition of their atmospheres and potentially decide whether they are possible candidates to house life.

Director of WUSAT Dr Bill Crofts said:

Being selected for the ESA launch is a great achievement on behalf of all the students in the group. We want our engineering students to get hands-on experience of working on the kinds of projects they will be working on when they go out into the working world after graduation.

Students from different engineering disciplines – such as manufacturing, electronics and mechanical engineering – all work together as they would in a real-life working environment.It’s this experience, as well as the engineering knowledge the students are gaining, that is very valuable to employers.”

WUSAT is a long-running project within the School of Engineering which has seen successive teams working on the design and build of satellites over the last eight years. Previous teams worked on the design and the electrical power supply system for the European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) satellite. The WUSAT project received funding from the 50th anniversary fund.