Our polishing kit assembly and shipping team at the Aerospace Development Center expects to be in full swing by the end of February, 2001, and you can expect to receive your kit early in March. You'll need to get started polishing your mirror immediately after you receive your kit. The deadline for getting your polished mirrors back to us is March 31, 2001. Please do not fill out an application unless you are willing to meet that schedule.

Starshine 3 will be nearly a meter in diameter (37 inches) and will weigh 88 kilograms (193 pounds). It will carry 1000 student-polished mirrors, 31 laser retroreflectors, and an array of solar cells and thin film batteries from the NASA Glenn Research Center. The solar cells will power an amateur radio transmitter being built by the South Dakota School of Mines and by Cynetics Corporation. This transmitter will send out a beacon signal every thirty seconds to amateur radio operators all over the world at 145.825 Megahertz. The beacon signal will contain information that will allow the amateur radio operators to measure the spin rate of the satellite and the performance of the solar cells and batteries. The Naval Research Laboratory is building the satellite, with assistance from the Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama, the Bridgerland Applied Technology Center in Logan, Utah, and the C. F. P. Paul Rousseau School in Drummondville, Canada. Some of the student-polished mirrors for this mission will be protectively coated with silicon dioxide by the Optics Laboratory at Hill Air Force Base, and some will be coated by the Space Optics Manufacturing Technology Center of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

Starshine 3 will fly on NASA's Kodiak Star mission out of the Kodiak Launch Complex, Alaska, on August 31, 2001. The unmanned launch vehicle for this mission will be a Lockheed Martin Athena I. It will place Starshine 3 in a 500 kilometer (300 mile) circular orbit, inclined to the equator by 67 degrees. This means that the satellite will be visible at twilight to all the children in the world as it orbits the earth for several years. The satellite will be deployed from the launch vehicle by a Lightband system being built by Planetary Systems Corporation. After certifying the deployment system on the Kodiak Star mission, we later plan to use it to deploy other Starshine satellites of this larger configuration from Space Shuttle orbiters.