Irvine students are on a mission to launch a satellite

It's a new kind of space race, 21st century style. More than 100 students from five Irvine high schools and a dozen more from a local middle school are on a mission named Irvine01, a yearlong collaboration to engineer, launch and place an operational nanosatellite in orbit. The Irvine students would be the first high schoolers in the country to accomplish it. The goal is to send a 4-by-4-inch device known as a CubeSat into low Earth orbit for the first in a series of missions. It is designed to carry a camera and a solar panel propulsion system and collect data such as temperatures and the satellite's speed, direction, location and altitude. The launch is planned for March 2017. More

(Source: Los Angeles Times - Mar 26)