The Mission for Education and Multimedia Engagement: Breaking the Barriers to Satellite Education

The Mission for Education and Multimedia Engagement Satellite (MEMESat-1) is a 2U satellite built by a team of twenty-two multidisciplinary undergraduate students at the University of Georgia Small Satellite Research Laboratory. The mission client is Let's Go To Space Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to K-12 outreach; this mission is funded by donations to Let's Go To Space Inc. and a grant titled the Mission for Education and Multimedia Engagement from the Georgia Space Grant Consortium. MEMESat-1 helps solve the barrier-to-entry problem in aerospace development by giving undergraduate students first-hand experience with developing a small spacecraft from the ground up, expanding K-12 accessibility to aerospace education, and providing a public platform for satellite interaction. It serves to educate college students on the intricacies of satellite development. Each subsystem team is led and fully staffed by undergraduate students who are responsible for every stage of stack development, from conception to launch. Development, assembly, testing, and validation of the avionics stack are done almost entirely in-house, cultivating a deeper understanding of otherwise black-box subsystems. Let's Go To Space will host an online portal for K-12 students to interact with and learn about MEMESat-1 while providing related educational information about space, physics, and radios. MEMESat-1 uses the opensource Little Free Radio in collaboration with the University of Buffalo Nanosatellite Laboratory. The Little Free Radio will transmit and receive images and audio over amateur radio bands, serve as a digital transceiver for the amateur radio community, and allow amateur radio users to interact with the satellite.