M-Cubed, a satellite built to accomplish more than one purpose

The M-Cubed project? It stands for Michigan Multipurpose Minisat. As in a tiny satellite that does more than one thing that was developed by smart kids at the University of Michigan.

In the summer of 2007, a small group of students took the opportunity to start a new project at the University of Michigan's Student Space Systems Fabrication Lab (S3FL). The objective of MCubed is to obtain a mid resolution image to date of Earth with at least 60% land mass and a maximum of 20% cloud coverage from a single cubesat platform. M-Cubed is planned to launch in the Fall of 2011 on the NASA's third Educational Launch of Nanosat (ELaNa).

And...they're still working on it. Dozens of students have poured in (we're guessing) hundreds of hours on this baby. And who knows how many frozen pizzas and cans of Red Bull?  Following the guidelines set forth by California Polytechnic State University, the wee orbitor has support from the University of Michigan, S3FL, Jet Propulsion Lab, and NASA's Earth Science Technology Office. See, it takes a village to do all kinds of things!