This is one project students can't take home when they're finished. They'll be sending it into space instead.

That's the objective of the CubeSat project -- the softball-sized cubical satellites UA participants in the Student Satellite Project are building. Constructing them is only half the assignment. The satellites have a job to do, and they can do it only while orbiting 750 kilometers, or about 450 miles, above the Earth.

Plans call for three UA student-built CubeSats to be launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on a Russian SS-18 rocket early next year. Each CubeSat is four cubic inches in size and weighs a little over two pounds.

Once in orbit the satellite will measure and test the magnetic stabilization and the spin rate, which has never been done for such small satellites. Carrying power-generating solar panels, "Rincon Sat" will provide engineering data about the satellite's systems which will be used for future CubeSats. It is named for Rincon Research Corporation of Tucson, which is supporting the project through funding and professional mentoring. Rincon Sat has now passed almost all of its engineering tests. It was delivered to California Polytechnic State University for payload integration Nov. 1.

A second satellite, Alcatel Sat, will be delivered in December and will measure the radiation effects on microchips, which are used in communications satellites.

A third satellite, FfizE Sat, is presently being designed and will test six optical retro reflectors similar to those the Apollo astronauts left on the moon. FfizE stands for Fresnel-Fizeau-Einstein, the last names of three scientists whose findings underlie the optical theories being tested.

A handful of other institutions in the U.S. and Japan are also building and launching CubeSats, which were designed for student groups by Stanford University's Space Systems Development Laboratory (SSDL) and Cal Poly .

Next stop: Mars
Building the small satellites costs less than might be expected -- about $200,000 for the first satellite. Rincon Sat. Most of the money is spent for students' wages. Each launch costs about $50,000. Footing the bill are private corporations such as Tucson's Rincon Research Corp.; Alcatel, a Paris-based communications company; the Arizona Commerce Department; and various University of Arizona colleges and departments.

Between 60 and 85 undergraduate and graduate students have participated in the six-year-old Student Satellite Project, the brainchild of AME student Chris Lewicki, who now works on Mars Landers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA.

The students, who receive either independent-study credit or wages for their efforts -- work in teams corresponding to the satellites' subsystems: mechanical structures and analysis, power generation and distribution, data and command handling, guidance navigation and control, tracking telemetry and command, and science.

Lead students that have worked or are working on the Rincon satellite are Andy Eatchel, a graduate student in ECE; technical manager Hirofumi Kawakubo, also in ECE; and AME mechanics team managers James Cody and Banessa Gonzales, who is now doing a summer internship with Alcatel in France.

The National Space Grant Student Satellite Program espouses a "crawl, walk, run, and fly" strategy that enables students to start with fairly simple projects and progress to more sophisticated ones. The program's goal, according to its Web site, is "to make aerospace history and send the first student-built satellites to Mars."