By Wang Wowen and Zhao Yong
CHANGSHA, June 28 (ChinaMil) — The National University of Defense Technology Satellite (NUDT Sat), independently developed by the College of Aerospace Science and Engineering of NUDT, was successfully put into the preset orbit on June 23 at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India.
The NUDT Sat, carrying the load of Von Karman Institute of Fluid Dynamics, was launched into space together with other seven CubeSats of EU’s QB50 project.
The data, a ground station in Changsha, capital city of central China’s Hunan Province, received from the NUDT Sat shows that the satellite is in good condition.
The NUDT Sat is the tenth nano-satellite (NanoSat) NUDT has successfully launched in the past five years.
The NUDT Sat weighs about 2.1 kg and it is of the standard 2U (10cm × 10cm × 22.7cm) structure. Its main load is the Ion/Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) used to carry out lower thermosphere atmospheric composition detection.
The NUDT Sat and the other CubeSats in the EU QB50 project are deployed in the orbit at an altitude of 500 km to form a satellite constellation to carry out multi-point, in-situ and long-duration exploration of lower thermosphere, including measurement of neutral particles and charged ion composition and distribution, resistance parameters, atmospheric temperature, near-Earth magnetic field, for reentry research and for in-orbit demonstrations of technologies and miniaturized sensors.
The EU QB50 project is the flagship project of the EU Seventh Framework Program (FP7), which attracts the participation of leading universities and research institutes from 23 countries in the world and has become the world’s largest international space cooperation project.
NUDT has successfully designed and successfully launched ten NanoSats in the past five years, including the world’s first single-layer NanoSat Tiantuo-1, China’s first video imaging NanoSat Tiantuo-2 and TianTuo-3 constellation which contains six NanoSats and Tianyuan-1, which is China’s first experimental satellite for satellites in-orbit refueling.