When professors Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University and Bob Twiggs of Stanford University invented the cubesat a little more than a decade ago, they never imagined that the tiny satellites would be adopted by universities, companies and government agencies around the world. They simply wanted to design a spacecraft with capabilities similar to Sputnik that graduate students could design, build, test and operate. For size, the professors settled on a 10-centimeter cube because it was large enough to accommodate a basic communications payload, solar panels and a battery.
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