 Weighing 5 kilograms, the miniature laboratory was a secondary payload on an Air Force four-stage Minotaur 1 rocket that delivered the Air Force TacSat 2 satellite to orbit.In the development of the GeneSat satellite class (at a fraction of what it normally costs to conduct a mission in space), Ames Research Center (Small Spacecraft Office) collaborated with organisations in industry and also universities local to the center.It is NASA's first fully automated, self-contained biological spaceflight experiment on a satellite of its size.