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.

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.

The WUSAT team would like to thank all of its sponsors for their support through our first year. Here's a photo of the entire team at last week's sponsors' lunch.

WUSAT successfully launched and recovered the balloon with prototype CubeSat yesterday. Click here to read more and see a few photos from the launch.

The project's polo shirts have arrived.

The prototype chassis for the balloon launch arrived yesterday, ready for assembly and then attachment of the electronics inside. Below is a picture of Elliott checking it over to give an idea of its size. More pictures of the team at work can be found under Photo Gallery in the Media section of the website.

The team with the poster on show outside the WUSAT lab:

Today a few team members visited Roke Manor Research near Southampton. We learnt a lot about Roke's experience in the space industry and gave them a presentation on our project.