Assembling a reception antenna

The distances between the different groups has been a bit of an obstacle. "When people meet, they look each other in the eye, and know what they mean," explains Bisgaard. "It is much more difficult to solve problems over the Internet, waiting for each other to type their message, then reply and decide things."

Conscious of this difficulty, ESA has brought everyone together for seminars every six months at the Agency's Technology and Research Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, where the spacecraft has been assembled and tested.

Next month SSETI Express will be flown to Russia. In August it is scheduled to be launched by a Cosmos rocket from the Plesetsk cosmodrome.

The Svalsat tracking station at Spitzberg

The students have prepared the mission like professionals. At the Svalsat tracking station on Spitzberg they have set up a small control centre.

"The students have the ability to control and monitor all the spacecraft's instruments, and do so at a distance via the Internet," explains Kim Olsen, one of the station's engineers.

2500 kilometres to the south, in the projects mission control centre at Aalborg University, students are watching the webcam pictures from Spitzberg. When the satellite is in its polar orbit, it will be providing images, freely available on the Internet. It will also be serving as an amateur-radio relay.

A project bringing European students together

One of the older students reflects on the true significance of this study project. "The main benefit, I think, is not technical, but in the human relationships, in the confidence we have built up to cooperate with other people, across borders and cultures, and under different conditions," says Kresten Sorensen.

All the students involved have an immense feeling of satisfaction at getting this far: building a satellite for less than 100.000 euros in less than two years.

As their spacecraft waits for its launch, like professionals, they remain very prudent, and refer jokingly to the famous 'Murphy's Law' that haunts the space business: "Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong… it's fundamental, almost like Newton!"

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