Campus Weather Satellite

About This Project

Deploy a 2U CubeSat with a low-resolution multispectral camera to capture cloud cover, vegetation indices, and land surface temperature over your campus region. Downlink imagery via UHF to a student-built ground station.

Overview

A campus weather satellite gives your team end-to-end experience with every phase of a space mission — from optics and thermal design to ground station operations and data processing. The payload captures multispectral imagery of your local region, letting you track cloud patterns, measure vegetation health through spectral indices, and observe seasonal land surface temperature changes from orbit. What makes this project especially rewarding is the ground segment: students build and operate their own UHF receiving station, decode raw downlinked data, and produce georeferenced image products that can be shared with your university's geography, agriculture, or environmental science departments. The imagery resolution will not rival commercial Earth observation constellations, but the educational value of operating a complete imaging pipeline — capture, compress, downlink, decode, geolocate, and analyze — is enormous. This is also one of the most visually compelling projects for recruitment and outreach, since you can literally show people pictures taken by your satellite.

Technical Details

Build a 2U payload around a low-resolution multispectral camera (e.g. Arducam OV5640 or FLIR Lepton 3.5 for thermal) with a nadir-pointing bracket. Downlink via UHF using PyCubed primary radio. Add a BME280 for onboard environmental reference. Students design a nadir-facing camera mount in CAD, 3D-print prototypes, then machine Al-6061 for flight. Image storage on microSD with JPEG compression before downlink. Ground station uses a Yagi antenna + RTL-SDR or SatNOGS node.

Research & Notes

Utah State GASPACS (2022) used a Raspberry Pi Zero + Pi Camera in 1U and successfully captured Earth imagery from LEO. CMU PyCubed-Mini includes a camera module natively. At 400-500 km altitude, a 2MP sensor yields ~100-500 m/pixel GSD — not competitive with commercial imagers but sufficient for cloud cover, vegetation indices, and outreach. I2C bandwidth (400 kHz ? 50 KB/s) bottlenecks image transfer — use SPI for data and I2C only for command/control. A 2MP JPEG image compresses to ~200-400 KB, requiring ~8-16 seconds over SPI at 25 KB/s effective throughput. Multispectral requires either filter wheel (complex) or multiple filtered sensors (simpler). For true NDVI, need at least red and NIR bands — consider dual OV2640 modules with bandpass filters ($15 each). Estimated cost: $500-$2,000 depending on camera selection and ground station build.

Required Disciplines

This project spans 4 disciplines, making it suitable for interdisciplinary student teams.

Next Steps

Ready to take on this project? Here's a general roadmap that applies to most CubeSat missions:

1. Build your foundation: Complete the core modules in the CubeSat Academy to understand spacecraft subsystems, mission design, and development workflows.
2. Form a team: Recruit students across the required disciplines and identify a faculty advisor. Plan for knowledge transfer between graduating and incoming members.
3. Write a mission concept: Draft a 1–2 page document outlining your objectives, target orbit, payload requirements, and success criteria.
4. Connect with a chapter: Join a Blackwing chapter for mentorship, shared resources, and access to the platform ecosystem.
5. Explore the developer tools: Visit the Developer Portal for platform documentation, SDKs, and hardware specs.
6. Plan your timeline: Map milestones to your academic calendar. Most projects align well with a 2–4 semester capstone or research sequence.
7. Reach out: Contact us to discuss your project goals, platform selection, and path to orbit.