The fall semester of 2016 has seen the launch of the University of Southern Indiana Engineering Program's first ever effort to conceive, design, and fabricate a spacecraft to be deployed into Earth orbit. Funded through NASA's Undergraduate Student Instrument Program (USIP), a student-led multidisciplinary team of undergraduate students will by the end of 2017 deliver a flight-ready nanosatellite to NASA for a ride into space. Dubbed the Undergraduate Nano Ionospheric Temperature Explorer (UNITE), the satellite will conduct space weather measurements in the lower ionosphere, a relatively unexplored region of Earth's upper atmosphere. This senior design project entailed two primary objectives: 1) as team leader, implement systems engineering tools and practices to oversee, direct, and facilitate the technical and programmatic implementation of the project, and 2) as the team's thermal engineer, develop a model of the thermal behavior of the spacecraft for comparison with temperature data collected during the mission. A conceptual design of the spacecraft and its mission is presented.