WUSAT-3 satellite Team/mission shortlisted for a place on the latest ESA Education Fly Your Satellite! launch programme

A rendered 3D design of the final satellite in orbit shows how our whole system will fit together with a deployable antenna array to pick up incoming signals from ICARUS data tags.

The WUSAT team are spending the week in ESRANGE, the space centre in northern Sweden and situated in the Arctic Circle where the REXUS rocket will be launched in 2015 containing the WUSAT CubeSat! This is for the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of our project where there will be several lectures from space experts, presentations by all of the participating teams and an in-depth discussion with a team of experts regarding the Student Experiment Document (SED) the team have written and the experiment as a whole. This will be an invaluable experience that will help develop the project to meet real space-worthy conditions and all the additional work that goes with it. Further updates from Sweden will be posted throughout the week.

More publicity has followed the WUSAT team in the wake of the successful REXUS bid. This includes articles on the project in the Independant, the Coventry Observer (which can be seen in the 'Media' tab) and Warwick's own paper, the Boar. The Rugby Advertiser also carried an article on the project and Oliver Vavasour one of this year's team members. This was followed by an article in the Engineering Designer, published in March 2014.

Our recent academic work has also been uploaded to the Media section. This includes the Winter newsletter for 2014 and the poster for WUSAT-2.

There has been even more publicity for the WUSAT project in media from around the UK. Articles have been featured in regional newspapers around the University and the hometowns of the team members, including the Coventry Telegraph, the Andover Advertiser and the front page of the Stevenage Advertiser. The articles can be viewed by clicking the above links.

The project was also mentioned in an article in the Components in Electronics (CiE) magazine, a well respected industry with good readership. We were mentioned in an article on our sponsor Harwin's Gecko connectors, which will be used in WUSAT - 2 extensively. It can be seen in the digital edition here on pages 24 - 25.

In addition, there are upcoming media events including project director Bill Crofts being interviewed for I-Cov radio that will be featured on this website soon.

Dr Bill Crofts, the director of the WUSAT project, was on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire radio yesterday. He talks about the satellite, it's payload, REXUS and the selection process involved. Catch-up on the interview here.

The past few weeks have seen plenty of publicity for the WUSAT project following our successful REXUS bid. First, BBC Midlands Today visited the Satellite Laboratory to film the team working and speak to the team. The piece is expected to be aired in the next few weeks.

After that, some publicity shots were taken of the team wearing their WUSAT polo shirts, one of which can be seen below, for articles on the project that will be appearing in local newspapers around the country. The corresponding Warwick news article can be seen here.

Finally, project director Bill Crofts will be appearing on BBC Radio Coventry & Warwickshire this afternoon talking about the project and the REXUS launch in 2015.

We are delighted to announce that we have been successful in our bid for a slot on the REXUS 1718 campaign!

We will now be looking to expand our team to tackle the increase in workload primarily looking at 3rd year engineering students.

Thank you everyone for your support and REXUS/BEXUS for the excellent advice, we will continue to update you on our progress towards the project's most ambitious target yet!

You can see the team who attended the workshop just after they finished their successful presentation in the image below, with ESA's eduactional mascot Paxi.

Tomorrow 5 of the team are flying to the Netherlands to take part in the REXUS workshop at the European Space Agency's ESTEC centre. There they will take part in some training activities, get a tour of the site and present our project proposal to a panel of experts. A successful outcome will result in a place on REXUS 17/18, a rocket launched from Sweden in February 2015, so best of luck to them!

This year (2013-14) sees the current Warwick University Satellite Team (WUSAT) enter a particularly exciting phase of operation. Following on from seven previous 4th Year MEng satellite teams who have worked on the European Space Agency’s moon orbiting ESMO satellite, and more recently our own WUSAT Cubesat satellite, we have now entered into collaboration with Prof Don Pollacco (a world leader in the search for exoplanets) and his team based in the university’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Group.

This year’s team will design and build a Cubesat satellite capable of carrying a spectrometer-based instrument. The satellite will be launched to an altitude of approximately 30km via a high-altitude weather balloon, and will then make a parachute controlled descent through the stratosphere during which time the on-board instrumentation will measure sunlight spectra at a range of atmospheric path lengths. This will emulate future Cubesat missions that are planned to investigate the spectra of extra-solar planets that may have the potential to support life-forms.

A submission has also been made to the European Space Agency to obtain payload space on an Orion rocket due to be launched in Sweden in March 2015 where a further development of this year’s satellite/spectrometer will be carried to an altitude of approximately 100km to repeat the experiment over the increased range of mesosphere/stratosphere/troposphere. This will be in collaboration with ESA and both the Swedish and German National Space Boards. Success on this mission will prove that satellite’s viability for an eventual full orbital launch.