Small Satellite Research Laboratory

The Spectral Ocean Color Satellite, known as the SPOC satellite, is a 3U CubeSat that will be the University of Georgia's first satellite.[11] The SPOC satellite was selected in by the NASA's Undergraduate Student Instrument Project and NASA's eight CubeSat Launch Initiative to be built in 2016-2018 and launched in 2018, 2019, or 2020.[10][12] SPOC is expected to be deployed from the International Space Station from the NanoRacks Cube-satellite Deployer.[11]

The primary objective of the SPOC Satellite mission is to perform the first moderate resolution multispectral analysis of the following phenomena off the Georgia coast from low earth orbit: vegetation heath, primary productivity, ocean productivity, near-coastal sediment, organic matter, and mapping the production of shelf waters and salt marshes. The SSRL also seeks to build a unique Georgia coastal imagery library that aggregates and classifies all gathered data from SPOC.[13] The SPOC mission's data will supplement the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research Program's data with data of Sapelo Island from orbit. The data sets generated by the SPOC satellite will be comparable to NASA's MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite from the spectral ranges of 450nm - 900nm.[14]

The Multi-view Onboard Computational Imager Satellite, known as the MOCI satellite, is a 3U CubeSat that will be the University of Georgia's second satellite. The MOCI satellite was selected in the ninth iteration of the University Nanosatellite Program, UNP-9.[11] The primary mission of the MOCI satellite will be to perform structure from motion (SfM) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and generate 3D point clouds on a landscape scale to generate Digital Elevation Models. This will be the first time a CubeSat has specialized in building 3D models using structure from motion. MOCI will employ customize algorithms for feature extraction, structure from motion, surface reconstruction, data compression, and oceanic anomaly detection.