Article By: Barbara Honegger Friday, January 16, 2009 Like the
Sputnik launch that triggered the Cold War space race, Russian
miniature spacecraft launches have catalyzed the Naval
Postgraduate School to design and build a revolutionary new
mini-satellite launcher to quickly bring the U.S. into the
competition. Space Systems Academic Group (SSAG) Profs. Jim
Newman and Rudy Panholzer and Research Associate Dan Sakoda came
up with the idea for the NPS CubeSat Launcher (NPSCuL) that
attaches to an Atlas or Delta rocket via a secondary payload
adapter and deploys a large number of miniature satellites into
tumbling, low-earth orbit.Command signals trigger a sequence of
spring releases in the "Jack-in-the-Box" device that catapult
the tiny cube-shaped spacecraft carried inside the launcher into
orbit. Once freed, the small CubeSats conduct a wide range of
missions, from earth observations to testing cutting-edge
technologies for spaceflight such as new solar cells, to
studying the effects of microgravity on biolog