Lessons Learned from a Remote Summer Internship Program: Student-Built 1U COTS CubeSats

An ongoing challenge in undergraduate engineering and science education is providing students with hands-on experience in the development of space technology, and to engage them in discovering new knowledge. The CUNY/Queensborough Community College, a Hispanic and minority-serving institution, has been very successful at engaging undergraduate students to design, assemble and test 1U Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) CubeSat. With funding from NASA MUREP, this past summer, students participated in a remote 8-weeks QCC-NASA summer internship, in which they were challenged to build a 1U COTS CubeSat Students CubeSats projects involved both technology demonstrations and scientific payloads. This poster describes the program and also discusses some of the programmatic and technical successes and challenges faced by students during the summer of the COVID-19 pandemic