CONTEXT:

• A team led by Keshav Raghavan has been chosen by NASA to have their CubeSat flown into space on future missions of NASA.
• CubeSats are miniature satellites intended as a standard, inexpensive design that can easily fit alongside larger satellites aboard launch vehicles.
• The team’s CubeSat BLAST (Bouchet Low-Earth Alpha/Beta Space Telescope) is named for physicist Edward A Bouchet.

BACKGROUND:

• BLAST (Bouchet Low-Earth Alpha/Beta Space Telescope) will contribute to the ongoing search for the origins and nature of cosmic rays, which will provide an insight into the origins of the universe.
• CubeSats are built from a modular structure of 10x10x10cm cubes and feature a wide variety of commercially available off-the-shelf components, designed to fit the structure from various manufacturers.
• NASA Ames launched its first CubeSat, GeneSat, in December 2006.  Since then Ames has launched 16 CubeSat spacecraft varying in size from 1U to 3U with an additional 12 CubeSats in development or awaiting launch.