Gregory's comments during a visit to main campus last April reflect the gritty details of real-life experience. The students he talked with are designing and building a satellite to be called ASUSat 1. More than 150 students are participating in the project. Each of them is learning something about gritty details, as well. It's not just a paper design project.
Most satellites weigh thousands of pounds and cost millions of dollars.
At 10 pounds, ASUSat 1 will be the world's smallest satellite to do meaningful science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Chandler, Ariz., will launch the minisatellite as a secondary payload in March 1997. The completed ASUSat 1 will be loaded into an OSC Pegasus rocket ahead of the primary payload. The ASU mission was the brainchild of Scott Webster, OSC's co-founder and president of its Space Data Division in Chandler. Webster proposed the idea in the fall 1993 semester after Rademacher and Helen Reed, director of ASU's Aerospace Research Center, asked him to collaborate on a project relevant to his company.