Washington, DC– U.S. Congressman Charles W. Boustany, Jr., MD (R-Southwest Louisiana) today announced the University of Louisiana at Lafayette received a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The award, worth $124,931 is for the “US Egypt Cooperative Research: Design and Implementation of Experimental High Resolution Imaging Payload System for Nano Satellites.” This multilateral project aims to explore the benefits of using nano satellites – including the CubeSat – in space versus larger, more expensive satellites. 

“I congratulate the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for attaining this award,” Boustany said. “The technologies this program will study and develop are valuable in many fields, including earth exploration and software development.  It is a prime example of multilateral cooperation toward a common goal of bettering the scientific community.”

The project will benefit both the United States and Egypt in their respective space aspirations, and students from both countries will be trained to use the nano satellites’ technology.  The project is under the direction of Dr. Magdy Bayoumi of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Dr. Amal Zaki with the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences in Cairo, Egypt.

“I am very pleased with this award, as it was a very rigorous competition with two different panels across the ocean,” said Dr. Bayoumi. “This is a far reaching project of developing the next generation of software in space based on ‘Embedded Intelligence.’ It is expected that Nano Satellite (NS) will have more and more applications at affordable cost and infrastructure.”

The award will become available August 1, 2011.

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