Please make a donation to support Gunter's Space Page.
Thank you very much for visiting Gunter's Space Page. I hope that this site is useful and informative for you.
If you appreciate the information provided on this site, please consider supporting my work by making a simple and secure donation via PayPal. Please help to run the website and keep everything free of charge. Thank you very much.

Ex-Alta 1 (QB50 CA03)

Ex-Alta 1 [University of Alberta]

Ex-Alta 1 (Experimental Albertan 1) is a Canadian 3U-CubeSat designed by the Department of Physics of the University of Alberta participating in the QB50 project.

Ex-Alta 1 carries a digital fluxgate magnetometer for the University of Alberta and the multi-Needle Langmuir Probe (mNLP) payload for QB50.

The Ex-Alta 1 Satellite has the following science objectives:

  • Serve as a platform for the In Orbit Demonstration (IOD) of a digital fluxgate magnetometer designed at the University of Alberta.
  • Address multi-point space plasma physics with data from the QB50 constellation using the Langmuir probe common payloads and the digital fluxgate magnetometer.
  • Take part in the QB-50 string-of-pearls constellation for in-situ measurements of the lower thermosphere to build an accurate model.

The QB50 project, which demonstrates the possibility of launching a network of 50 CubeSats built by Universities Teams all over the world to perform first-class science in the largely unexplored lower thermosphere.

The satellites of the QB50 constellation were launched to the ISS in mid 2016, from where the satellite was deployed on 26 May 2017.

Nation: Canada
Type / Application: Technology, thermospheric research
Operator: University of Alberta
Contractors: University of Alberta
Equipment: Digital fluxgate magnetometer, mNLP
Configuration: CubeSat (3U)
Propulsion: None
Power: Solar cells, batteries
Lifetime: 3 months
Mass: 4 kg
Orbit: 397 km × 408 km, 51.64°
Satellite COSPAR Date LS Launch Vehicle Remarks
Ex-Alta 1 (QB50 CA03) 1998-067MP 18.04.2017 CC SLC-41 Atlas-5(401) with Cygnus CRS-7, ALTAIR 1, SUSat, UNSW-EC0, i-INSPIRE 2, ZA-AeroSat, nSIGHT 1, LilacSat 1, NJUST 1, Aoxiang 1, SOMP 2, QBITO, Aalto 2, X-CubeSat, SpaceCube, DUTHSat, UPSat, Hoopoe, LINK, SNUSAT 1, SNUSAT 1b, qbee50-LTU-OC, BeEagleSat, HAVELSAT, Phoenix, PolyITAN-2-SAU, QBUS 1, QBUS 2, QBUS 4, CSUNSat 1, CXBN 2, KySat 3, SHARC, Lemur-2 30, ..., 33

References:

Cite this page: