09/28/2026
BREAKING NEWS! TK1 has officially launched into space!! 🛰️🚀
This morning, our student-built CubeSat satellite finally launched aboard a NASA high-altitude balloon mission at Fort Sumner, NM and is currently traveling to 105k feet on a balloon the size of the Empire State Building.
Our CubeSat sits in a cooler on a metal-frame gondola, housing various other payloads from around the country. In addition to our camera taking a shot every 10 seconds, sensors on our satellite record temperature, field-of-view relative light intensity, acceleration, and more. It also has a magnetometer and a gyroscope… and, ultimately, a whole host of lessons for our Space Program to review once the satellite comes back to Earth.
A HUGE gratitude to Dr. Jordan Alexander and Dr. Michael Garcia for getting our space program off the ground 😏
This year, TK1 students are building more CubeSats and we’ll then launch them right here on low-altitude balloons (5km up), at UNM-Taos, as part of our Family Space Day scheduled for sometime in the spring.
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