The second Young Engineers' Satellite (YES2) is a project of the ESA Education Department. Its mission is to demonstrate the re-entry of a light-weight capsule by the use of a tether rather than a conventional retro-rocket. The satellite is built by mostly European students under management of Delta-Utec SRC from the Netherlands. The hardware is launched together with the ESA Foton-M3 mission, on a Soyuz launch vehicle carrying a Foton satellite onto which YES2 is attached, mid-September 2007 from Baikonur Kosmodrome. The mission hardware consists of three main elements. First, FLOYD - the Foton Located YES2 Deployer, which is the tether deployer that will remain attached to Foton during the whole mission. Second, the subsatellite attached to the other end of the tether: MASS - the Mechanical and data Acquisition Support System. Third, Fotino - a re-entry capsule, to be released from MASS after tether deployment. The total hardware mass is 36 kg, of which 14 kg will be deployed on the end of the 5.5 kg, 30 km long, 0.5mm thick tether: the 6 kg Fotino together with MASS will be lowered into a new orbit through momentum transfer utilising the gravity gradient and the Coriolis effects. In this new orbit Fotino's speed is drastically reduced, so that when Fotino is released from MASS, it will not make another orbit, but collide with the atmosphere, slow down due to the heavily increased air drag, re-enter and land. The tether is cut on the FLOYD end 10 seconds after the release of Fotino, causing also tether and MASS to hit the atmosphere but burn completely. During the deployment the tether will be among the brightest object on the sky in areas close to twilight and when it is fully deployed it will be the longest man-made object in space ever. The Foton satellite will orbit the Earth in a near circular orbit at 280 km altitude. The YES2 mission is performed during day 11 of the Foton-M3 mission, with the planned landing zone in the area of Kazakhstan. The paper describes briefly the mission, organizational and educational aspects, and goes deeper into the design and innovative technology development.
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