Mission Impact
The MAXWELL mission has a broad impact facilitated by its technological development
goals and involvement as a graduate project at the University of Colorado Boulder. The MAXWELL
mission also seeks to have community involvement in the education and encouragement of the
pursuit of STEM careers among grade school students. The project has two primary goals. The first
is to provide a means of education regarding the design, build, test, and operation of real satellite
systems for students at the university level. The second is to produce a functional satellite system
that will actually fly in space.
Regarding the first goal of educating students, the MAXWELL project has involved
graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Colorado since its inception in the
Spring of 2016. An estimated 75 students have been significantly involved in the development of
the MAXWELL CubeSat to date with more on the horizon. Typically students tend to be from the
graduate program and are involved formally through the ASEN 5018/6028 graduate projects
course or through an Independent Study facilitated through the ASEN department. Some
undergraduates have also been involved with the project. Typically undergraduate involvement is
limited through a Discovery Learning Apprenticeship (DLA) program, but some undergraduate
students have done exceptional work and become active volunteers or paid students working on
the project.
The MAXWELL management team also sees the value of active outreach to promote the
project and to promote STEM involvement in the community. One of the most important pillars of
this philosophy is to maintain an active image in the engineering college and aerospace
department. Having other students know about the project is essential to keeping enrollment
numbers up in order to have the team staffed as best as possible each semester. There are also
other opportunities for outreach and promotion at conferences. As the MAXWELL project
matures, opportunities arise for public presentations about the project at conferences including
the CubeSat Developers Workshop at CalPoly and the AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. These are two opportunities that the MAXWELL project
plans to present a mission overview at in 2020.
Completion of the mission’s communication experiments will also lead to opportunities to
publish additional papers on the performance of the mission. These papers will likely have a
collaborative aspect with industry as well since the X-band experiments onboard the satellite are
sponsored in part by industry partners. Blue Cubed LLC is the developer of the XTx radio platform
that is supporting MAXWELL s-band communication experiments. MMA Design LLC is the
supplier of the proposed T-DaHGR Antenna which is to be flown and tested on the MAXWELL
satellite. These two industry partners along with students and faculty at the University of
Colorado have a vested interest in publishing the performance results of the communications
experiments performed via the MAXWELL satellite platform.
Management also plans to support some high school outreach in the Spring of 2020 as part
of a collaborative effort with high school students with developed skills in CAD modeling, 3D
manufacturing, and programming.
MAXWELL Mission Handbook 12