The rocket launch that will carry Cornell's ICE CUBE satellite, originally scheduled for October, has been pushed back to February 2005.

Although the delay is disappointing for the Cornell team, "The good news is that this gives us a couple more months to complete our tests," says Mark Campbell, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and faculty adviser for the project.

Campbell explains that ISC Kosmotras, the Kazakhstan-based firm providing the Dnepr rocket in which ICE CUBE is hitching a ride, was asked to delay the countdown by the customer providing the primary payload and footing most of the ICE CUBE is Cornell's version of the CubeSat program run by Stanford University and California Polytechnic State University designed to engage students in the design, construction, and launch of "picosatellites "— small satellites just 10-by-10-by-10 centimeters that are deployed for a variety of research tasks.

With ICE CUBE (Ionospheric sCintillation Experiment Cube- Sat), the mission is to take measurements of disturbances in the ionosphere using GPS (global positioning system) units in the satellites that send signals to a receiver on campus that records variations in signal strength.

This summer a half dozen student team members stayed on campus to continue tests, subjecting ICE CUBE to artificial conditions that replicate those it will encounter, including extreme vibration, a low-pressure environment, and temperature variations ranging from 70 to minus 20 degrees Celsius.

The team is now trouble-shooting problems discovered during short-range communications tests, Campbell says. "We can use the extra time to deter-mine why we can make contact between the satellite and base station in some instances but not in others."

The ultimate objective is to improve GPS technology, commonly used in devices that can pinpoint the location of a person or object. A problem with the satellite-based system is that periodic, rapid fluctuations in the ionosphere interfere with the transmission of GPS signals. These scintillations have been measured from the ground, but not yet from orbit.

Campbell's students, an interdisciplinary mix of majors in mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, have spent three years, working in teams of 20 to 25 members, designing and building the satellites.

—Jay Wrolstad