Artists impression of UKube-1 in orbit – Credit Clyde Space
In addition to the amateur radio FUNcube boards the UK Space Agency’s first CubeSat UKube-1 will also carry designs by artists Jon Gibson and Amanda White, who run the famous iam8bit gallery in Los Angeles.
The Wired story says
“[Nanosatellites] open the door to do lots of different things in space,” says Clyde Space CEO Craig Clark. “Within five years I’d like to be making 100 nanosatellites a year”.
40 percent of CubeSat missions, which are satellites with a one-liter volume, carry Clyde Space hardware. The company has invested over £500,000 of its money into UKube-1, which will be the first satellite entirely assembled by them.
“Craig Clark, the head honcho at Clyde Space, emailed us and said he was a fan of our work,” says Gibson (according to Clark, iam8bit’s art adorns the walls of the company’s offices). When Gibson and White realized that Clark was serious about them doing art with the satellite, “our faces lit up! To design something that’s going to orbit Earth — how cool is that?”
Read the full Wired story at http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/pop-art-satellite-ukube1
Watch “Art in Space” – The Universe’s First Celestial Charging Station
Flight and Engineering Models of FUNcube-1 with FUNcube-2 boards
UKube-1 will carry a set of AMSAT-UK FUNcube-2 boards which will provide:
• 1200 bps BPSK telemetry beacon on 145.915 MHz
• Linear transponder downlink 145.930-145.950 MHz for SSB/CW communications
• Linear transponder uplink 435.080-435.060 MHz
In addition UKube-1 also carries:
• ISIS 1200 bps BPSK telemetry beacon on 145.840 MHz
• UKSEDS myPocketQub 442 on 437.425-437.525 MHz with 11 mW output using spread spectrum
• 1 watt transmitter on 2401.0 MHz from Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), Cape Town, for high data rate mission data downlinking using up to 1 Mbps QPSK or OQPSK modulation
Gunter’s Space Page lists UKube-1 as manifested on a Soyuz-2-1b Fregat-M rocket. It is expected to be launched at the end of this year from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
AMSAT-UK 
You must be logged in to post a comment.