M-Cubed

M-Cubed (University of Michigan)

M-Cubed is a 1U CubeSat deceloped by the University of Michigan's Student Space Systems Fabrication Lab (S3FL). Development began in 2007.

The objective of MCubed is to obtain a mid resolution image to date of Earth with at least 60% land mass and a maximum of 20% cloud coverage from a single cubesat platform. S3FL is also developing the MCubed bus with the intention of making it a heritage design, thus allowing for future missions to be flown on the same bus.

Also on board is JPL's COVE (CubeSat On-board processing Validation Experiment) to demonstrate an on-board processing system to optimize the data processing and instrument design of a multi-angle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (MSPI) for the ACE Decadal Survey mission which will achieve a two-orders of magnitude reduction in data rate.

M-Cubed is planned to launch in the Fall of 2011 on the NASA's third Educational Launch of Nanosat (ELaNa).