I was heading back from the dentist  morning when I got a text message from my good friend Naeem.   He let me know that today was a big day for us.

Naeem is my favorite space freak… He’s been working very hard with a group from Bulgaria to build a small “cube sat” satellite which will be an orbit for the next three or so years. He’s going to be using it for cloud computing from space experiments. So cool

And when Naeem told me about the project I mentioned how much I would love to get a samstone in orbit. (There was already one in space.. but not in orbit  see http://samstones.org/WordPress1/?p=1827)
We explored different options but it turns out that the satellites are very space and weight constraint so instead of putting a real Sam stone on it I created an image from a 3-D scan of a real stone and gave it to the manufactures. They etched into the side of one of the struts inside the small satellite.

Anyway.. Naeem was told that the space launch was today. 2 PM specifically… And then the satellite itself would be deployed around 2:30. Here’s a picture of it…

Heres a video Naeem sent me of the actual deployment into orbit

Sam is now in orbit!