MSU’s Space Science Center receives nearly $10 million in federal funds for new payload operations center

Republished from WEKU.

Morehead State University’s Space Science Center will receive nearly $10 million in federal Community Project Funding, courtesy of an earmark announced by Congressman Hal Rogers. Chloe Hart is a ground station engineer and operations lead there. She said the money will go towards a new payload operations center.

“Where other companies who have these payloads in orbit doing different instrumentation and different science objectives, those can actually be operated here at Morehead State University.”

Hart said training students for the workforce is just one of the main objectives at the Space Science Center.

“We also do a lot of research and development, so we have many different facets. We do ground station operations, which is commanding and receiving telemetry from these different various spacecrafts, whether they’re government or commercial.

Hart said they also work on spacecraft development. She said a $10 million federal grant last year allowed them to add new antennas to their ground station to support NASA during future moon missions.

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Originally published by WEKU.

Republished with permission.

https://www.weku.org/the-commonwealth/2024-10-19/msus-space-science-center-receives-nearly-10-million-in-federal-funds-for-new-payload-operations-center