The small satellites — weighing in at about 88 pounds each — will be coming out of the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory established this month by a collaboration of researchers from the College of Engineering and the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology.

"It is just a start. Mainly we're excited because you're getting the chancellor's office to agree to start this whole, new initiative ... It will probably be a number of years before anything substantive exists that we can show people," said Peter Mouginis-Mark, interim director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology.

The project has start-up money with a $4 million federal appropriation sponsored by U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. University officials are hoping the federal funds grow to $40 million to pay for two launches and two spacecraft, with the first mission projected to take off in 2009.

The cost of constructing a single satellite is estimated at between $2 million and $4 million.

The project developed out of an earlier program aimed at interesting minority students in conducting experiments flown into space. All the eight undergraduates involved in the new satellite program are native Hawaiian, and two are women, Mouginis-Mark said.

An effort by the university within the last year to send a smaller, relatively primitive satellite into space used a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan. But that launch failed because the rocket didn't work. In the future, more complex satellites could be launched from rockets in Hawaii or elsewhere, Mouginis-Mark said.

The small satellites would be capable of gathering information to address both local and global scientific questions.

"The one we're most excited with would be an instrument to map the distribution of coral reefs around the world. And coral is a very sensitive indicator of climate change. ... And believe it or not scientists don't actually know where all the coral is around the world," Mouginis-Mark said.

The university is hiring new faculty to support the initiative, including Trevor Sorensen, who was mission manager for the Clementine mission to the Moon in the early 1990s.

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On the Net:

UH College of Engineering: http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/