Scotland's 1st Spacecraft Is Tiny Satellite with Biq Mission

摘要

Scotland's first satellite will soon find a home in orbit around the Earth — a forerunner of things to come under a collaborative, national nanosatellite program in die United Kingdom. Dubbed UKube-1, the small, novel cubesat spacecraft has been constructed by Clyde Space at its West of ScoUand Science Park in Glasgow and is completing final testing for launch later this year onboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Cubesats measure 10 centimeters a side and generally weigh about 1 kilogram. The small but powerful spacecraft comprises payloads diat include the first GPS device aimed at measuring space weather in Earth's plasmasphere—the innermost layer of the planet's magnetosphere. The satellite also comes equipped with a camera that will take pictures of Earth from space and test the effect of radiation on space hardware using a new generation of imaging sensor, and an experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of using cosmic radiation to improve the security of communications satellites and to flight test lower-cost elec tronic systems.