Welcome to Columbia University’s CubeSat Program!
Mission Leads: Robert Pendergrast ([email protected]), Nidhi Shah ([email protected]), and Ruimian Zheng ([email protected])
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Columbia CubeSat was (re)founded in 2022 by a small group of students within the Columbia Space Initiative with the goal of designing, building, and launching a satellite into space. In 2023 we received $300,000 in launch funding from the NASA Cubesat Launch Initiative for our design of LIONESS - (Line Imaging Orbiter for Nano satellite enabled Spectrographic Surveys). This proposal was also awarded $60,000 in grant money from the University Nanosatellite Program. Today, the team is hard at work making progress towards seeing LIONESS to completion. We’ve teamed up with the Schiminovich Astronomy & Instrumentation Lab (SAIL) for continued development of LIONESS, and are looking to launch the satellite in 2027.
While this has been going on, the CubeSat team has also been working on a sister satellite, named “LionCub”. LionCub is smaller in scope compared to LIONESS, providing the team with excellent preparation in satellite engineering for LIONESS. LionCub is set to launch this academic year in early 2026!
Interested in learning more? Checkout our documentation below:
While you’ll find a lot of our information here on this notion page, below are some useful links to have on hand:
:github: Github
:googledrive: Google Drive
Projects are administered on a mission-wide level. Tasks are generally handled on a sub-team to sub-team basis.
