At t-minus 60 seconds before liftoff last Friday morning, Laura Peticolas could be seen on a Zoom call crossing her fingers on both hands.
Peticolas, a Sonoma State University professor who is associate director of its STEM learning center, has for the past five years been managing an evolving team of students who built a miniature satellite, or CubeSat, along with undergraduates from Howard University and the University of New Hampshire.
Their efforts culminated in a spectacular milestone at 10:44 a.m. Friday, when that satellite, slightly larger than a half-gallon carton of milk, was propelled into the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere on a rocket that blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County…