Projects › Space systems · leadership
OSPREY — Lehigh’s First CubeSat
A student-built satellite for tracking ocean plastic.
- My role
- Lead Mechanical Engineer (mechanical team of six)
- When
- Sep 2023 – Sep 2025
- Where
- Lehigh University Space Initiative
- Tools
- SolidWorks · GD&T · mass properties · CubeSat Design Specification
OSPREY is a 3U CubeSat — about the size of a loaf of bread — designed to photograph ocean plastic from orbit. Power, radio, attitude control, the camera and the structure all have to fit inside a 10 × 10 × 34 cm box and meet the CubeSat standard before anyone will put it on a rocket. I led the mechanical side of that puzzle.
What I did
- Placed every component — boards, batteries, antenna, camera — inside the frame and owned the packaging decisions: what goes where, how it mounts, and how it all comes together at assembly.
- Calculated the satellite’s mass, center of mass and moments of inertia, and kept them within the CubeSat standard.
- Looked into what the internals will go through — launch loads and stresses, temperatures, vacuum — and what that means for the layout.
- Led a team of six and worked with the power and communications sub-teams to bring their hardware into the design.
How it turned out
A complete mechanical design for the satellite, a proposal submitted to NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, and $200K raised by the team from alumni to send it to space. The project is still building toward launch.
Mission overview (PDF) · NASA CSLI proposal (PDF) · Lehigh Engineering news story
