The picosatellite design began as a senior project but quickly became a way of life. The young team's concepts were impressive enough that the students were asked to make a presentation at a national seminar on small satellites.

"Everything is hand-built, the circuit boards were milled here, every board structure and every antenna was hand-fabricated by us," said Amy Slaughterbeck, one of the group's electrical engineers. "We actually soldered parts on boards many, many times. This was pretty much self-funded, so we had to do things ourselves." Undoubtedly, the group members will be big fans of outsourcing once they get into industry.

Overall, the women's senior project spanned 10 months. Ten busy months.

"Combined, I believe we spent around 5,380 hours in total, though that doesn't include a lot of the early work we did planning and meeting to talk about our progress and next steps," said Corina Hu, another EE. "Lots of the time, we spent 40 hours a week on the project. That fluctuated sometimes, like when we had finals, but I think we spent at least 20 hours per week per person on the project."

The picosatellites will fit into a larger satellite designed at Stanford University. A couple of months after the military does its work, the university's unit will be deployed, and it will then eject the smaller satellites. They will measure changes in the ionosphere.

When the Santa Clara students first got together and decided to submit a proposal to Stanford, they had no plans to limit their membership to women. But they had a combination of mechanical and electrical engineers and a computer science major who all knew one another, so they decided to link up. They named their team Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the moon. It wasn't just gender and the heavenly location that attracted them to that name.

"We really spent some time looking around on the Internet when we were thinking about naming our group," Slaughterbeck said. "Finally we voted on names. We picked Artemis because she wasn't only a feminine icon, she was known as a hunter, which was not a typical role for a woman at that time. We were atypical as satellite builders, so it fit."

Women make up only about 16 percent of all engineering graduates, according to the Society of Women Engineers, and the number of women in satellite design is even smaller. That got the Santa Clara students noticed. But it was the fact that the picosatellites are tinier than some experts said was possible that earned them respect.

The three satellites weigh a total of 611 grams and consume only 24 cubic inches of space. Two of the units house a 68HC11 processor with memory, gallium-arsenide solar cells and AA batteries, as well as sensors. Very low-frequency transmitters and receivers communicate with both the mother satellite and earth stations.

A third, less complex module simply broadcasts the Artemis Web site in Morse code. Ham radio operators who hear the code and check the site will realize they've been communicating with an orbiting satellite.

Sandwiching the demands of the project between classes, studying, part-time jobs and the desire for some downtime was never simple. "It started out as fun, but it came to a point when we got tired," said Theresa Kuhlman, a mechanical engineer. "A lot of things didn't work the way we thought they would, so we had to change things and sometimes do them over. We were all tired of it and it was a struggle, but we knew it was something that we had to deliver within a set time frame."

One of the group bailed out fairly early in the program. "We started out with seven of us, but right in the beginning, the first week of January, our computer science engineer made a personal decision to pursue another project," Slaughterbeck said. "No one else had her skills, so we had to get friends to help us."

As problems arose, team members worked together to keep each other motivated. Professors, upperclassmen, former students, associates at the Stanford lab and others supplied answers, suggestions and support.

Rubbing elbows with experts

One big motivational moment came when the team was invited to present a paper at a small-satellite conference. Getting away from the university and being around experts in the satellite industry was a heady experience.

"When we went to the small-satellite conference we had a very good time. We all got together and we were there for a few days," Slaughterbeck said. "We were unique, since we were about the only females there. We had a lot of notoriety, and that was a natural high for us. It really sparked us to work on the project."

The Artemis team built on uplifting events like the trip and kept their eyes on the final goal. Even though they were building more modules than other groups involved in the Stanford project, and building them with limited funds and time, they didn't let problems overcome them.

"We never had any doubts we would make it within the deadline," Hu said. "We built three satellites as students; the other picosatellites [on the mission] were not student-built. They were done by a radio team and some companies."

The lengthy effort was even something of a motivator for some of the team members, crystallizing career plans for a couple of Artemis engineers. One is now doing graduate work at an aerospace school in France. Another has started working for Lockheed. A third is focusing on communications and seriously considering zeroing in on satellite communications.

The remaining students are doing graduate work now. Some plan to trek to the launch, which was originally set for September. Even though they completed the Artemis project in May, when they all graduated, they still have a stake in the outcome. You couldn't spend all that time designing and building the satellites and not get emotionally involved. Even those who can't attend will pay attention.

"If it works, it will be very exciting. There will be a sense of completeness, of closure," Kuhlman said.