SpaceX launches satellite built by USC students

About 60 USC engineering students and faculty members just became space pioneers after their creation just hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket.

MAVERIC, a satellite about the size of a shoebox, is one of 81 payloads aboard the Falcon 9 rideshare spacecraft that launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County early Tuesday morning. The satellite was designed and built by students at USC Viterbi's Space Engineering Research Center, and it'll soon be launched into orbit from the rocket.

"We're trying to visualize what would be in space, maybe 50 years in the future," said PhD student Cristóbal Garrido Cáceres. 

The satellite will document how well an LCD screen, like one on a standard living room TV, works in space when the students' photos are projected onto it. Another camera will test out displaying 3D holograms in space. Lead researcher Dave Barnhart says holograms could have practical applications, like creating parameters for docking spacecraft.

Back on Earth, students on USC's Exposition Park campus will talk to the satellite through rooftop antennas. They'll help map the Earth's magnetic fields and collect data that could ultimately help scientists control spacecraft with more precision.

While the satellites may be literally out of this world, engineers say the lessons learned will be useful back home.

"The space domain today is an integral sort of just part of absolutely everything that every American, that almost every human on earth utilizes … banking systems, the GPS tracking systems that we use to drive," Barnhart said. "We don't even think about it anymore. It all comes from the satellites."