Outreach
Beaver Works Summer Institute
The Small Satellite Collaborative is happy to partner with the Beaver Works, run as a collaboration between MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT School of Engineering, on their annual BW Summer Institute. In particular, they run the Build-A-Cubesat course, which is an excellent opportunity for high school students to get hands on experience building, testing, and flying a 1U cubesat. This year, they are hosting 3 sessions, sponsored by AIAA, SWE, and NSBE. Are you interested in space and coding? Would you like to build a prototype satellite? They are looking for High School students interested in learning to build a 1U CubeSat to complete an ocean science research mission. Join them for this free AIAA-BSWI Build a CubeSat Challenge! The AIAA-BWSI challenge website is the best place to find out more information.
Zero Robotics Program
Danielle Wood, director of the Space Enabled research group and assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab and in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been named as the new principal investigator (PI) for the Zero Robotics program at MIT. Founded over a decade ago by MIT’s Alvar Saenz-Otero, Jacob Katz and David Miller, Zero Robotics is an educational program that hosts tournaments to teach middle and high school students to write code and program with robots on the International Space Station (ISS). With new funding, the Zero Robotics program will fully restart under Dr. Wood’s leadership in 2022. In preparation, MIT and the Aerospace Corporation collaborated to host a session of the Zero Robotics program this past summer. Learn more here.
MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP)
The MIT-wide MSRP program seeks to identify talented sophomores, juniors, and non-graduating seniors who might benefit from spending a summer on MIT’s campus, conducting research under the guidance of MIT faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students. The Small Satellite Collaborative’s member laboratories have hosted MSRP students in previous years and are open to hosting again in the future. If you’re interested in applying, find out more here.
Climate CubeSat Co-Build (C3)
The MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative led this effort to teach under-represented minority high school students from the regional area about CubeSat development and testing. This program involves a 1 year curriculum comprised of 1 semester of coursework covering CubeSat design and 1 semester of building a CubeSat system and launching it for testing on a weather balloon. The Climate CubeSat Co-Build (C3) program was developed in partnership with MIT AeroAstro and Lincoln Laboratory. Find out more here.
Graduate Women in Aerospace Engineering (GWAE) Programs
GWAE hosts a variety of outreach programs for middle school and high school age girls. Find out more here.
PEARL Community Outreach
The team of researchers involved in research on the PEARL vessel, Platform for Expanding AUV exploRation to Longer ranges, engaged with the local community on Cape Cod, where they were executing testing, providing several educational seminars on space and engineering. You can learn more about their work and this program on the Follow PEARL website or at Pleasant Bay Community Boating.
Other Opportunities
We are open to involvement in other outreach activities. If you are interested in partnering with us, please reach out.