Work of Maine students to blast off on Firefly Aerospace rocket

ORONO, Maine (WABI) – In the early hours of Monday Morning Firefly Aerospace is set to launch a rocket into orbit.

And it’s bringing a satellite, known as a CubeSat, that was built by students at the University of Maine.

“I think it’s exciting that the first time at the university level that we have folks like Ali and his students that developed CubeSats and they’re gonna launch them. We have had other examples at the K-12 level that have worked with organizations that we supported outside of the state to help students prepare CubeSats but this is the first case where we had actually developed a CubeSat from scratch,” said Terry Shehata the Executive Director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium.

The satellite called MESAT1 is carrying three payloads that were designed by middle and high school students to record data for studying climate change.

“The cool thing about this project is that the scientists are actually high school students and teachers. In 2019 we ran a competition statewide and 11 schools submitted proposals. We selected three and those are the science missions that were defined by the students. These missions include monitoring water bodies for harmful algal blooms, trying to find urban energy islands by monitoring albedo, and also they are looking into turbidity of water concentration of phytoplankton,” said Doctor Ali Abedi, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maine.

Dr. Abedi says that he hopes this kind of work can help inspire students.

“I think if you ask someone to learn something without telling them why they’re not motivated. You can ask somebody to just learn math in abstract way without telling them why that’s useful. I think this project helps the students understand what they want to do and what the impact is. And then they came back and said oh, if I want to do this, I now need to learn physics. I need to learn this course of math, I need to learn like aerospace. I think the motivation and enthusiasm that was instigated by this project to this level definitely priceless,” said Dr. Abedi.

A livestream of the launch can be found here.

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