UNITEC 1

UNITEC 1 [UNISEC]

The UNITEC 1 is a satellite (or “an artificial planet” as it will escape the Earth gravitational field) which will be launched into Venus transfer orbit by H-IIA launch vehicle with the main payload of Planet-C Venus orbiter developed by JAXA on May 2010. It has the following engineering missions:

1. Onboard computers developed by several universities will be tested in the harsh space environment in the form of a competition; i. e., the computer which can survive to the last in the radiation-rich deep space environment will win the competition.
2. Technologies to receive and decode very weak and low bit rate signal coming from deep space will be developed and experimented.
3. Technologies to estimate orbit and signal Doppler shift of the satellite based on the received RF signal will be developed and experimented. These technologies are essential for tracking and receiving signals from a satellite in deep space.

UNITEC-1 has been developed by 20 universities of UNISEC (University Space Engineering Consortium), which is Japanese university community developing nano-satellites.

Contact with the spacecraft was established after launch, but was lost shortly after.