ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Students at a Virginia high school will get to see their hard work pay off on Thursday.
A satellite, built by students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, launched into space on Nov. 26.
The project to build the satellite took seven years to accomplish.
Now, on Thursday, the satellite, called TJREVERB, will move away from the International Space Station (ISS) and deploy its antenna.
After 45 minutes, the students will attempt to contact the spacecraft using Iridium’s satellite constellation.
The school broke down just how much work the students put into the project over the last seven years.
"The students have done something very special; they engineered the entire project from selecting and integrating Space Grade and COTS parts," the school said. "They designed the printed circuit boards and wired the components themselves. They wrote the software drivers so the hardware can communicate. In addition to the systems engineering aspect of the project, they also developed the flight software, wrote in Python and it executes using a Raspberry Pi Zero. They milled switches and did the cabling."
The school added, "They performed the assembly and the integration. As you can see, the high school students did the impossible and built a custom satellite chassis for their space-based experiment. It will be very exciting to see student work make its way to space."
The school says the students have done something many countries have yet to accomplish.
"In fact, we are one of 12 teams of high school students throughout the world working on satellites, and the only one to have built it from the ground up."
The satellite will be deployed at 5:05 a.m. on Thursday. WUSA9's Get Up DC will interview one of the students who helped build the satellite a little later in the morning at 6:15 a.m. Get Up DC will also be joined by the Robotics Lab Director Kristen Kucko.