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LINK (QB50 KR01)

LINK [KAIST]

LINK (Little Intelligent Nanosatellite of KAIST), is a South Korean 2U-CubeSat designed by KAIST participating in the QB50 project.

It carries the INMS (Ion/Neutral Mass Spectrometer), which measures the mass of ions and neutral atoms, as the primary payload for the QB50 project. The secondary payload is two Langmuir probes, which are in-house sensors developed by Space Science Laboratory of KAIST. The mission lifetime is about 3 months, because of its low altitude. UHF/VHF will be used as downlink/uplink. Since the satellite has to align with the velocity direction for the INMS, one reaction wheel and magnet torquers will be used for the attitude control.

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 satellite was launched with the bulk of the QB50 constellation to the ISS in 2017, from where the satellite was deployed on 18 May 2017.

Nation: South Korea
Type / Application: Technology, thermospheric research
Operator: KAIST
Contractors: KAIST
Equipment: INMS, Thermocouple experiment, Langmuir probes
Configuration: CubeSat (2U)
Propulsion: None
Power: 2 deployable fixed solar arrays, solar cells, batteries
Lifetime: 3 months
Mass: 2 kg
Orbit: 401 km × 404 km, 51.63°
Satellite COSPAR Date LS Launch Vehicle Remarks
LINK (QB50 KR01) 1998-067LV 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, Ex-Alta 1, LilacSat 1, NJUST 1, Aoxiang 1, SOMP 2, QBITO, Aalto 2, X-CubeSat, SpaceCube, DUTHSat, UPSat, Hoopoe, SNUSAT 1, SNUSAT 1b, qbee50-LTU-OC, BeEagleSat, HAVELSAT, Phoenix, PolyITAN-2-SAU, QBUS 1, QBUS 2, QBUS 4, IceCube, CSUNSat 1, CXBN 2, KySat 3, SHARC, Lemur-2 30, ..., 33

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