NEWS TIP SHEET
A CU-Boulder student satellite dubbed "The Little Satellite That Did" re-entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up following nearly six years of collecting valuable data while being controlled from the CU campus.
The $5 million satellite, known as the Student Nitric Oxide Explorer, or SNOE, was a scientific, Earth-orbiting mission. The spacecraft carried instruments to measure nitric oxide in the upper atmosphere, the intensity of x-rays from the sun and ultraviolet light from the aurora. It was designed and built by students, faculty and engineers at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
The satellite came down Saturday morning, Dec. 13, at 2:34 a.m., re-entering off the coast of Ecuador, according to NORAD officials and independent calculations by Harry Zimmer of Berlin University.
As the first of a series of university-based satellite missions sponsored by NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, SNOE was launched in early 1998. The project has involved more than 100 CU-Boulder students, primarily undergraduates, said Principal Investigator Charles Barth of LASP.
For more information contact SNOE Missions Operation Lead Flight Controller Tim Lloyd at (303) 735-3780 or Jim Scott in the CU-Boulder News Office at (303) 492-3114. Lloyd is a master's degree candidate who works at LASP.