Georgia Tech

Prox-1 is being developed and built almost entirely by students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech. This summer, five of those students landed internships at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Christine Gebara is the Prox-1 project manager. I reached her by phone on a Thursday afternoon, as she and Lindsey Berger, the spacecraft's mechanical and ground support team lead, kicked off a road trip from Pasadena to Zion National Park in Utah. Gebara said JPL allows interns to work 80 hours in a nine-day span, which gives them alternating three-day weekends. Gebara is an aerospace engineering student, while Berger is in mechanical engineering. Both are undergrads.

Before we spoke, Gebara took an informal survey of the Prox-1 team at JPL to ask how working on the project has helped prepare them for future spaceflight careers.

"The consensus we came to is that it gives us the language that's used in the aerospace industry," she said. "So when I'm at NASA, I'm familiar with the same problems they have when they're developing their spacecraft."

She said one example was the deceptively difficult decision of how best to secure a spacecraft's wiring. At JPL, she was working on a SmallSat named RainCube, and happened to mention something about Prox-1's wiring harness.

"One of the engineers said, 'How are you anchoring this part?' And I got to have that conversation with him," she said.

Because the Prox-1 team is relatively small and close-knit, engineers with different backgrounds get insight into all of the subsystems and procedures that it takes to bring a successful mission together.

"Interfacing with a student from a completely different engineering discipline means you get to come at a problem from different perspectives, and see how your experiences coordinate," Gebara said.

I told the two students to enjoy their trip to Zion, and Gebara said they would—after she called in to two Prox-1 meetings Friday morning.

Arizona State University

By the time LightSail 2 and Prox-1 are in Earth orbit, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will be on its way to visit asteroid Bennu, where it will survey the asteroid for about a year before collecting a surface sample to bring home to Earth.

OSIRIS-REx and Prox-1 have something in common: Both are equipped with heat-sensing instruments built at Arizona State University. OSIRIS-Rex will use a spectrometer called OTES to create a global temperature map of Bennu and determine which minerals are present on the surface. Prox-1's thermal camera will be used to hunt for LightSail 2 amongst the cold backdrop of space.

The similarities between the instruments are no coincidence, says Mike Veto, an ASU geological sciences Ph.D. student who built Prox-1's cameras and serves as the mission's instrument lead. Veto's academic advisor is Philip Christensen, the principal investigator for OTES.

Back when he was an undergraduate, Veto helped propose the visible and infrared cameras that would fly on Prox-1. When the mission was accepted for the University Nanosat Program, he built the imagers with Christensen's guidance, and will include the experience as part of his academic dissertation.

He even has an appropriate name for Prox-1's infrared camera: THESIS, or THermal camera for Exploration, Science and Imaging Spacecraft. The insrument was also inspired by THEMIS, an infrared imager currently flying aboard the Mars Odyssey probe.

"I've been learning from the gurus while trying to mimic their experience at a student level," Veto told me recently.

At Arizona State, he has been able to use some of the same state-of-the-art facilities and tools for THESIS that were used to build OTES. The school sees CubeSats as a way to bridge the gap between space community veterans and their students.

"There are number of new CubeSat missions in the pipeline here, like LunaH-Map, AOSat, and Phoenix," Veto said. "We're starting to build a lot of hardware as students."