With SpaceX launching many objects into orbit, USC students have designed a satellite that’s currently up in space.
Students at USC’s Viterbi Space Engineering program helped design MAVERIC, a satellite that went up in space during last month’s SpaceX launch.
MAVERIC will aim to help further space exploration in the future and help test next-generation space technologies, like low-cost magnetic field sensing to improve space weather data, using AI-based navigation systems.
More than 60 students from the program participated in the design, and the project took around two years to complete before the launch.
But MAVERIC isn’t the only thing the USC students have built. They have also helped work with NASA to create newer technologies that will help space research not just now but also into the future.
“The coolest thing about working with the students is they don’t know what can’t be done,” said David Barnhart, who is a research professor in USC’s Department of Astronautical Engineering. “So, they can always a question, why? Or why not? And so that’s really refreshing from my standpoint, because that’s really what’s needed to make those big breakthroughs in innovation.”
Nicholas Zecchini was one of the students who worked with professor Barnhart on creating MAVERIC, and says the satellite is testing out how newer technologies will hold up in the unforgiving environment that is known as space.
“That data helps to better understand the magnetic field that Earth itself gives off,” he said. “And understand how LCD screens, like the screens that are on our phones or on our TVs, how they react in space.”