A CubeSat is a class of miniaturized satellite with a form factor of 10 cm (3.9 in) cubes. CubeSats have a mass of no more than 2 kg (4.4 lb) per unit, and often use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components for their electronics and structure. CubeSats are put into orbit by deployers on the International Space Station, or launched as secondary payloads on a launch vehicle. As of August 2021, more than 1,600 CubeSats have been launched.
Rincon 1 was a CubeSat built by the Student Satellite Program of the University of Arizona. The primary payload was furnished by Rincon Research, hence the name. Rincon 1 was the product of the work of about 50 students, ranging from college freshmen to Ph.D. students, over the course of several years. It was launched, after being postponed several times, on board a Dnepr on July 26, 2006, but the rocket failed and the satellite was destroyed.
AAU CubeSat was a CubeSat built and operated by students from Aalborg University in Denmark. AAU CubeSat was launched on 30 June 2003 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on a Russian Rockot launch vehicle.
ITUpSAT1, short for Istanbul Technical University picoSatellite-1, is a single CubeSat built by the Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Istanbul Technical University. It was launched on 23 September 2009 atop a PSLV-C14 satellite launch vehicle from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh in India, and became the first Turkish university satellite to orbit the Earth. It was expected to have a minimum of six-month life term, but it is still functioning for over two years. It is a picosatellite with side lengths of 10 centimetres (3.9 in) and a mass of 0.990 kilograms (2.18 lb).
SSETI Express was the first spacecraft to be designed and built by European students and was launched by the European Space Agency. SSETI Express is a small spacecraft, similar in size and shape to a washing machine. On board the student-built spacecraft were three CubeSat picosatellites, extremely small satellites weighing around one kg each. These were deployed one hour and forty minutes after launch. Twenty-one university groups, working from locations spread across Europe and with very different cultural backgrounds, worked together via the internet to jointly create the satellite. The expected lifetime of the mission was planned to be 2 months. SSETI Express encountered an unusually fast mission development: less than 18 months from kick-off in January 2004 to flight-readiness.
Chasqui I is a one-kilogram nanosatellite developed by students at Peru's National University of Engineering (UNI) based on CubeSat technology. Developed with assistance from the Russian Southwest State University (SWSU), Kursk, it was part of an educational project to acquire the experience and ability in developing satellites.
Radio Aurora Explorer (RAX) is the first National Science Foundation sponsored CubeSat mission. The RAX mission is a joint effort between SRI International in Menlo Park, California and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The chief scientist at SRI International, Dr. Hasan Bahcivan, led his team at SRI to develop the payload while the chief engineer, Dr. James Cutler, led a team of students to develop the satellite bus in the Michigan Exploration Laboratory. There are currently two satellites in the RAX mission.
SARAL is a cooperative altimetry technology mission of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES). SARAL performs altimetric measurements designed to study ocean circulation and sea surface elevation.
CubeSat Space Protocol (CSP) is a small network-layer delivery protocol designed for CubeSats. The idea was developed by a group of students from Aalborg University in 2008, and further developed for the AAUSAT3 CubeSat mission that was launched in 2013. The protocol is based on a 32-bit header containing both network and transport layer information. Its implementation is designed for embedded systems such as the 8-bit AVR microprocessor and the 32-bit ARM and AVR from Atmel. The implementation is written in C and is ported to run on FreeRTOS and POSIX and pthreads-based operating systems such as Linux. The three-letter acronym CSP was adopted as an abbreviation for CAN Space Protocol because the first MAC-layer driver was written for CAN-bus. The physical layer has since been extended to include several other technologies, and the name was therefore extended to the more general CubeSat Space Protocol without changing the abbreviation.
F-1 is a CubeSat built by FSpace laboratory at FPT University, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in partnership with Angstrom Space Technology Center (ASTC), Uppsala University, Sweden and Nanoracks LLC, United States. Its mission is to train young engineers and students about aerospace engineering and evaluate an advanced three-axis magnetometer, Spin-Dependent Tunneling Magnetometer (SDTM) designed in Sweden by ASTC.
RAX-2 is a CubeSat satellite built as a collaboration between SRI International and students at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. It is the second spacecraft in the RAX mission. The RAX-1 mission ended after approximately two months of operation due to a gradual degradation of the solar panels that ultimately resulted in a loss of power. RAX team members applied the lessons learned from RAX-1 to the design of a second flight unit, RAX-2, which performs the same mission concept of RAX-1 with improved bus performance and additional operational modes. Science measurements are enhanced through interactive experiments with high power ionospheric heaters where FAI will be generated on demand.
e-st@r was a miniaturised satellite built by the Politecnico di Torino. It was a 1U CubeSat design with a 10 cm side and a mass not exceeding 1.33 kg.
AAUSat-3,, is the third CubeSat built and operated by students from the Aalborg University in Denmark. It was launched on 25 February 2013 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) launch vehicle (PSLV-C20). AAUSat-3 carries two Automatic Identification System receivers as the main payload.
ESTCube-1 is the first Estonian satellite and first satellite in the world to attempt to use an electric solar wind sail (E-sail). It was launched on 7 May 2013 aboard Vega VV02 carrier rocket and successfully deployed into orbit. The CubeSat standard for nanosatellites was followed during the engineering of ESTCube-1, resulting in a 10×10×11.35 cm cube, with a volume of 1 liter and a mass of 1.048 kg.
Niwaka or FITSAT-1 is a 1U CubeSat satellite deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) on 4 October 2012. The Niwaka satellite includes high power LEDs which are driven by 200 watts pulses, allowing Morse code style communication from the sky to the ground. FITSAT-1 (Niwaka) communicates with ground by means of 5.8 GHz high-speed transmitter. It also has a 437 MHz beacon and transmitter with data rate 1200 bit/s for telemetry downlink.
iCube-1 is a miniaturised satellite built by the Institute of Space Technology in Pakistan, with an objective to provide a wide range of future experiments in the domain of imaging, microgravity, biology, nanotechnology, space dynamics, chemistry, space physics and various other fields. It can also provide a testbed for developing satellite constellations for specific applications.
EQUiSat was a 1U CubeSat designed and built by Brown Space Engineering, an undergraduate student group at Brown University's School of Engineering. EQUiSat's mission was to test a battery technology that had never flown in space which powered an beacon that was designed to be visible from Earth.
e-st@r-II is a miniaturized satellite designed and built by Polytechnic University of Turin, as part of the "Fly Your Satellite" program of the European Space Agency.
BGUSAT was an Israeli research CubeSat built by the IAI and Ben Gurion University.
