DEVELOPMENT OF THE SATELLITE PLATFORM QUETZAL FOR MONITORING THE POLLUTION EMISSION COLUMN AND THE REMOTE SENSING OF NATIONAL TERRITORY

摘要

The project Quetzal was born for the need to have pollution monitoring for Mexican cities and Latin America territory in a daily basis. The project envisaged the development of a small satellite constellation for having more comprehensive information about pollution patterns in several cities of the region. The Project has been granted by the National Council of Science and Technology for a first stage of development. The funding has been used to obtained electronic equipment and instrumentation in order to integrate some of the satellite subsystems such as the attitude control, telecommunications and information handling and processing, as first proposals. The project not only has technical objectives but academicals as well, such as the integration of different groups of students at different levels, the creation of new subjects in academic programs, new infrastructure at the laboratories, the consolidation of the aerospace group in the High Technology Unit of the Engineering School of the University, at the Juriquilla Campus of the UNAM. As it is multidisciplinary project the efforts to gather and to identify the strengths in the different groups in the university has been a challenging labor for the collaboration not only in the UNAM but also there are colleagues in other institutions that would like to participate. The lessons learned and the first results of the project will be presented, as well as the efforts to establish the basic infrastructure we had to build in order to develop some of the subsystems, and the collaboration with the National Laboratory of Space and Automotive Engineering and the Thematic Network of Space Science and Technology of CONACYT.