The Sultan Qaboos University in Oman joined forces with leading technical universities from all over the world to take part in the INSPIRE project.
INSPIRE, established by the University of Colorado Boulder, stands for International Satellite Program in Research and Education. It brings together leading tech minds to design and build tiny satellites to train future scientists and engineers:
We are training students to build flight hardware, conduct mission operations and analyze scientific data. We see INSPIRE as a path for science and engineering students at participating institutions across the world to earn PhDs while working on multi-year space missions.
The partnering institutions include universities from France, Japan, Taiwan, India, Oman, and Singapore.
At the last INSPIRE meetings last year in Taiwan, the CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and its partners, ended up with a project to design and build a small “CubeSat.” The Rubik’s cub look-alike is a tiny satellite studying the ionosphere and its impact on the space weather. The satellite and the instrument consist of a bunch of three connected, cube-shaped devices – each about the size of Rubik’s cube. The instrument is set to launch as a secondary payload on an Indian Space Research Organization vehicle in 2019. LASP is working on the spacecraft to house the package.