The JUPITER programme

The JUPITER programme — Joint Universities Programme for In-Orbit Training, Education and Research — is a ground-breaking UK initiative developed by the Space South Central universities of Southampton, Surrey and Portsmouth.

It provides students with immersive, hands-on experience that mirrors the demands of the commercial space sector and prepares them to work in the space sector.

In July 2025 five students travelled to the Etlaq Spaceport in the region of Duqm in Oman, from where their Jovian-O payload was scheduled to launch on the KEA-1 launch vehicle, made by Stellar Kinetics, as part of the Duqm-2 mission. In the end the launch was halted before ignition during the final preparations, due to a technical issue with onboard actuators

Jovian-O is a 6U CubeSat – a type of small satellite, roughly the size of a shoebox. The  prototype deploy pod was designed by students at Surrey and made on campus.

In November,  the Jovian-O students won the Student Space Achievement award at the prestigious Sir Arthur Clarke Awards, for the “design, build, integration and testing of a suborbital Earth observation payload with various different instruments all built by the students, and for successfully integrating their payload onto the rocket at Etlaq Spaceport, Oman, gaining invaluable experience in launch operations and international collaboration”. The award was presented to them at dinner to round off the ‘Reinventing Space’ Conference hosted by the British Interplanetary Society in London.

Alejandro Parra Pintado, from the Aerospace Engineering Group at the University of Southampton said:

“It’s been a really rewarding experience, and the project has greatly expanded my engineering knowledge while working on a real satellite that will be launched into space.
“Thinking that my work was going to blast off into space to collect data about our planet and help uncover the mysteries of dark matter was thrilling. As it turned out the launch failed – also very much part of the experience of what happens in the space sector. I got a job in the space sector in September, so I am very happy!”

Read more about The JUPITER programme .