Minisat 01

Minisat 01 [INTA]

Minisat, the Spanish space agency, Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aerospacial (INTA) {195 209}kg minisatellite was launched on a Pegasus-XL from the Canary Islands (Spain) on the 21st April 1997, into a 570 km × 577 km orbit inclined at 151 degrees. The launch is reported to have cost US$10.4m. The satellite measures 1145 × 1005 × 1170 mm, with four 45 W, 1.5m deployable panels. The spacecraft power system is 28 V unregulated with 60 W average power requirement. Uplink and downlink is via S-band, 5 W at 1 Mbps, and data storage is 32Mbyte. It is 1-axis spin stabilized with an accuracy of 3 degrees. The spacecraft bus and payload roughly share 50% each of the available mass.

The satellite is built by the spanish CASA company, and the selected payload to the MINISAT 01 is composed of three instruments:

• EURD is a spectrograph that will study the background radiation in the extreme ultraviolet range. It is a collaboration between Spain and USA.
• LEGRI is a collaboration between Spain and UK that will study the low energy gamma radiation from astronomic sources using detectors HgI2.
• CPLM is a spanish project to study the behaviour of liquid bridges in microgravity conditions

It is the first in a series of planned satellites based on this bus, and is designed to operate for 2 years.