ESTCUBE-1 NANOSATELLITE FOR ELECTRIC SOLAR WIND SAIL DEMONSTRATION IN LOW EARTH ORBIT

摘要

This paper presents ESTCube-1 nanosatellite, mission status and ground segment. ESTCube-1 is a single unit CubeSat that was launched into 670 km altitude sun-synchronous polar orbit in May 2013. Almost all of the nanosatellite subsystems have been developed by students in Estonia. ESTCube-1 takes the first step in realising electric solar wind sail (E-sail) technology by demonstrating centrifugal deployment of a 10 m long near final type tether and by measuring the'magnitude of the resulting micronewton scale E-sail force. For deployment of the tether the satellite is spun up to 1 revolution per second with the spin-axis parallel to Earth's rotation axis. After deployment the electron gun is turned on and off synchronously with the satellite spin. The primary scientific mission is to measure the changes in the satellite spin with gyroscopes resulting from Coulomb drag interaction with the moving ionospheric plasma. In addition to the satellite, a ground station for communication has been built and a new mission control software based on Hummingbird software platform is being developed.