Q-PACE (Cu-PACE)

Q-PACE [UCF]

The Q-PACE or Cu-PACE (CubeSat Particle Aggregation and Collision Experiment) is a 3U CubeSat mission developed at the University of Central Florida (UCF) to investigate the behaviour of dust particles in low gravity and to perform a long-duration microgravity experiments in orbit to observe novel low-speed collisions in greater numbers than possible in ground-based, parabolic and suborbital flight experiments.

The long durations will enable study of rare events, such as sticking or fragmentation that occur only in one collision in a thousand. The mission will examine impacts between compact millimeter-sized and centimeter-sized particles and aggregates of micron-sized grains. This size combination was selected due to experimental results that suggest combining particles with very different sizes enables a fraction of the larger bodies to grow.

The payload consists of a GoPro video camera and a test cell - one of the reservoir chambers contains glass and iron beads of 1 mm in diameter and the second reservoir contains SiO² aggregates sieved to a size distribution around 100 µm in diameter.

It was selected in 2015 by NASA to be launched as part of the ELaNa program.