November 4th, 2009 - Members of the MCubed team concluded that the camera choosen as our payload was not capable of interfacing with our on-board processors. The MCubed team held a Concurrent Design Meeting (CDM) last weekend in order to summarize the trade study under way for choosing a new camera.

MCubed will be flying a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The FPGA, designed at JPL, will work in parallel with MCubed to analyze the raw picture being taken by our camera payload.

WELCOME

Inspired by the opportunity for a new major project in the University of Michigan’s Student Space Systems Fabrication laboratory (S3FL), a small group of students took the initiative in the summer of 2007 to determine a new direction for the student lab. The result was the start of the M-Cubed program at the university. The project was made possible by S3FL and the cubesat initiative offered through the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly). Through this initiative, a launch opportunity will be provided at the end of 2009 at the low cost of $40,000. The cubesat platform shall not exceed a mass of 1 kg and shall fit within the envelope of 10 x 10 x 10 cm to satisfy the design requirements imposed by Cal Poly.
The objectives of the project are both educational and functional. The primary educational objective is to provide students with a design-build-test-fly (DBTF) learning environment for training the future space systems workforce. Students will learn the engineering design process in a real-world setting and application. Furthermore, once the first iteration of the mission is completed, the project will be documented and refined as to facilitate future projects using the cubesat platform, such as curricular development of intermediate laboratory courses for undergraduates.
The functional objectives of the mission is to obtain the highest color image resolution to date (the current design of 1280 by 1024-pixel CMOS camera can provide better than 200-m resolution) of Earth with at least 60% land mass and a maximum of 20% cloud coverage from a single cubesat platform. Along with this, S3FL is developing the M-Cubed bus with the intention of making it a heritage design, thus allowing for future missions to be flown on the developed bus.