Try It At Home: Build your own satellite (paper model)!

• By Maggie Masetti
• March 18, 2011
• 4 Comments

One of the things we do a lot of at NASA Goddard is build satellites. Many, many missions have come through here to be either constructed, or tested, or both!

But did you know that you can build your own versions of many of these missions? Ok, maybe they won’t be life-sized, but some of these paper models are pretty cool! We’ve featured a few of them in this post.

First up is the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a small X-ray satellite that allows scientists to studying the timing of objects like neutron stars and black holes.

• Model directions and parts (full disclosure, I designed this one many years ago!)

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The James Webb Space Telescope will be a giant infrared space telescope that will be able to see the first stars and galaxies formed in our universe. It’s kind of odd-looking, so it makes an interesting model.

Nina Heimpel, from Swales Aerospace, developed a model for us.

• Model parts and directions

Model building John Jogerst modified our model, and sent us .pdfs of his directions and modified parts. John is a real pro at modeling – check out this gallery of his spacecraft paper models.

• Model parts and directions linked from this page

Credit: John Jogerst

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Fermi is a gamma-ray space telescope that studies black holes, neutron stars, and other sources of high-energy gamma rays.

• This link is for a pdf of directions and parts.

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This list of models with difficulty ratings seems pretty complete. You can find Chandra, Hubble, Swift, and more!

If you’ve got more suggestions, tell us in the comments or on our Facebook. If you want to share photos of models you’ve done, let us know that too!