A
student-built spacecraft rocketed into space alongside several other
microsatellites early Thursday, riding a Russian booster skyward in a space
staged from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
The boxy SSETI
Express satellite, built by more than 400 university students for the
European Space Agency (ESA), launched into space atop a 10-story Kosmos
3M rocket at 2:52 a.m. EDT (0652 GMT). According to
Russia's Interfax News Agency, the spacecraft and seven other
microsatellites reached their intended orbit shortly afterward.
"This
image that we have of the launcher on the pad, this is the image they had,"
said Philippe Willekens, education
projects administrator for the ESA, of SSETI Express' student builders before
the successful launch. "They wanted to...launch that
dream, and it's finally paid off."
The SSETI
Express satellite is the first spacecraft of three planned by the ESA's
Student
Space Exploration Technology Initiative (SSETI) program, which is at
encouraging student interest in space and engineering, while offering practical
experience.
Built from
donated and student-built components, the 136-pound (62-kilogram) SSETI Express
satellite is about the size of a small washing machine and is expected to
photograph the earth and serve as a radio transponder for amateur radio
operators. It also carried three 4-inch (10-centimeter) wide picosatellites
into orbit, ESA officials said.
Riding into
orbit with SSETI Express were Russia's Mozhayets-5
satellite, as well as the Britain's TopSat, Iran's Sina-1, Norway's Ncube-2,
Germany's UWE-1, Japan's XI-5 and China's DMC-4 - which is also known as
Beijing-1.
Delays
in the delivery of Sina-1 pushed today's space shot from its original Sept. 30
launch date, Interfax said.
China's
Beijing-1 spacecraft should generate an extremely detailed map of the country.
The spacecraft was expected to form part of the international Disaster
Monitoring Constellation (DMC) and carries the China Mapping Telescope to image
the nation's topography, according to officials with the optics firm Sira,
which built the telescope for the Britain's Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd
(SSTL).
With
a resolution of about four meters, the China Mapping Telescope is reportedly
about eight times more powerful than past DMC satellites, and will be used for
mapping and disaster monitoring in preparation for Beijing Olympics, Sira
officials said.
SSTL
- which also constructed the TopSat spacecraft - provided the Beijing-1 for the
Beijing Landview Mapping Information Technology Ltd, according to their
website.
Meanwhile,
ESA officials hope that SSETI Express won't be their last student-built
project. Plans are already underway for an Earth orbiter - the European Space
Earth Orbiter (ESE0) and a Moon orbiter, and interest seems to be growing among
the program's target audience.
"Every year a dozen or so students of
our university join the project," Marcin Jagoda, who graduated from Poland's
Wroclaw University of Technology in July where his team built SSETI Express'
communications system, told SPACE.com before launch. "Currently [the]
team is working on the communications system for the European Space Earth."
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