Over The Moon: Warwick Students Accepted Onto Space Programme

A group of third and fourth year students are among nine university projects chosen to be on board the European Space Agency (ESA) rocket REXUS which will take off from the Swedish National Space Centre Esrange. The students won’t have to bear apollo-ing conditions as they send the satellite – known as WUSAT2 (Warwick University Satellite Team). The satellite, measuring just 10cm x 10cm x 20cm,  will contain their own electronics, communications and sensor systems to carry out an experiment suggested by a team of physicists at Warwick who hunt for planets outside our solar system and analyse their atmospheres.

Up Ur-Anus! The very talented engineering students are preparing to launch a satellite 100km into space.

The astronomical achievement by the Warwick engineering students will provide data that is useful to help astronomers better understand the composition of their atmospheres and potentially decide whether they are possible candidates to life.

Oliver Vavasour, a member of the Warwick University team building the satellite, said: “As far as we are aware we are the only solely undergraduate team to have been chosen to launch their own experiment into space with ESA. Now we’ve been selected our work has only just started. We have to design and build the satellite and all its electronic and communication systems, no mean feat seeing as the final satellite will measure just a few centimetres. But we’re all hugely excited about the launch as it’s not every day you get to take part in a space mission.”

What a Star: Oliver Vavasour is a major part of the University’s project.

The Warwick Satellite Team is a long-running project within the School of Engineering which spent six years designing the electrical power supply system for ESA’s ESMO satellite designed to orbit the moon. It is now in the second year of designing and building Warwick’s own satellite with a team of students launching WUSAT1 30km above Earth’s surface using a balloon launch last year.

An anonymous yet Galileo enthusiast first year Physics student is thoroughly excited by the prospect of the University being one of the only Universities involved in such a project, she said: “It’s such an amazing feat for Warwick to achieve and proves the great intellectual breadth and talent that the Physics and Engineering department, here, contains both in lectures and hard working students that contribute to such ground breaking projects.”

So as Buzz Lightyear would put it – “to infinity and beyond!” We wish every member of the Warwick University engineering team contributing to this project all the luck – it’s sure to be out of this world!