The New Mexico Sounding Rocket Project is a hands-on engineering and research based pilot project with the aim of developing skills and exposing participants to opportunities in the STEM disciplines. The current group of six first and second year students are building a payload (named CATSat-1, or the CubeSat Applied Technology Satellite) for a sounding rocket launch in 2016. They are responsible for all facets of the project including electrical and mechanical design, software development, fabrication, and testing.

The electrical team is working on designing and creating the next generation flight computer board and a support board that integrates with their payload.

The mechanical team is designing the enclosure, as well as doing thermal and stress analyses. They will be leading the environmental tests as well.

The software team is creating agents to interact with the payload using COSMOS.