Samantha Foster

February 16, 2012

   

"If You Dream It, It Can Happen”

The dreams of launching a satellite will soon become reality for a group of Ole Miss undergraduate students studying engineering.

The group of Ole Miss students, who are apart of the Mississippi Space Grant Consortium, have been working on building a small satellite for the past year.  It has been a goal this group set years ago to accomplish and they are finally seeing the realistic plan to accomplish it. Kendall Holloway, a sophomore engineering student, if not apart of the construction of this satellite but has heard a lot about it.

“Believe it or not, electrical engineering students are building a satellite to be launched into outer space,” said Holloway.

The satellite is called the Mississippi Imaging Space Satellite 1, or “MISSat-1,” and is programmed to capture images of Mississippi from outer space and sent the pictures back. The pictures captured by “MISSat-1” will be digitally sent to the University of Mississippi’s campus station located in Anderson Hall. This satellite is very small and is built to operate in earth’s low orbit.

The students are all members of the Mississippi Space Grant Consortium (MSSGC).  This is a non-profit organization throughout the state of Mississippi that focuses on a higher learning of space. This organization is supported by NASA and offers scholarships and internship opportunities to work for NASA in the future. The MSSGC has departments at 12 schools in the state of Mississippi and sponsor a variety of conferences and programs to bring schools together. Dr. Atef Elsherbeni is a professor and apart of the engineering department behind constructing the satellite.

“I am not sure if other schools in Mississippi have built a satellite but no one has launched one,” said Elsherbeni. “I am not even sure how the process of others is relative to our group process.”

The students from Ole Miss are very anxious to launch “MISSat-1” and are proud to represent the university amongst other competing schools that are apart of the Mississippi Space Grant Consortium. If the satellite is a success and is launched correctly, the students from the University of Mississippi will be able to share that at the next conference of the Mississippi Space Grant Consortium.  Presenting this accomplishment at the conference would be very awarding to the community in Oxford and to the University.