A team of Sonoma State University students spent the past three years building and programming a small cube satellite, which will be launched into space this coming December by NASA. The satellite was named the “EdgeCube”, a collaborative project between Sonoma State, Santa Clara University, and Morehead State University in Kentucky.  

Second-year master’s computer engineering major David House was one of the founding students to work on the cube satellite. 

“EdgeCube was a project we started three years ago, and the goal was to determine the health of the earth by tracking the leaf index, which is the measure of the red reflection of leaves compared to the infrared, so that difference tells us how healthy the plants are, and how much water, live plants, and dead plants there are.”

Tracking the leaf index of the whole globe will help the EdgeCube team determine the health of the earth and where there are increases and decreases in plant life. 

David Story, a fourth-year undergraduate electrical engineering major, with a minor in computer science, joined the project early on with David House.

“NASA has what’s called the Undergraduate Student Instrument Program, where they allocate funds for proposed projects of the cube satellites from students, and if you win one of these proposals, you get money to build your satellite with the program and a free launch into space,” stated Story.

The Sonoma State students of the EdgeCube team were helped by multiple volunteer mentors, including technical mentor J. Garrett Jernigan, Ph.D., Lynn Cominsky, Ph.D. of the physics department, who helped write the proposal, and Matthew Clark, Ph.D. of the geography department.

Matthew Clark, Ph.D., previously did a project using high altitude airplanes to map the leaf index of California. “They wanted to transfer this to a small satellite so that we could get a broader data set; in this case the whole world versus just California,” said Story. 

Jesus Gonzalez, an electrical engineering senior, joined the project just earlier this year and adjusted quickly to the pace of the project. “I was more of a hardware person on this project, making sure everything would fit inside of the satellite body, so one of the best moments is when it actually came together and worked without anything going wrong.” 

J. Garett Jernigan, Ph.D., led some of Sonoma State EdgeCube’s members to NASA’s facilities in Texas on Sept. 24, 2019. The EdgeCube went through a series of tests to measure its capability of holding up through space travel. After passing tests, it was scheduled to be transferred to Florida, where it will launch on Dec. 4, 2019, aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 is part of a commercial resupply mission, where NASA sends food and essentials to astronauts at the International Space Station, “and our cube-sat is going up to the space station with them, where they have systems to launch a cube-sat into orbit,” stated Story.

Students added a personalized touch to the cube satellite before it was sent off to NASA by placing an origami paper crane on the inside of the EdgeCube.

“Anyone who helped out on the project and anyone we wanted to give special thanks to, we had their names printed on a piece of paper and we folded it as a crane because it’s a symbol of peace, and now a symbol of SSU flying in space.”