DISCO = Danish Student Cubesat Project
Press release March 2021
Danish students will launch their own satellite next summer
The Danish Students CubeSat Program DISCO will, in collaboration with the Danish company Space Inventer, launch its first satellite with a Falcon-9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center next summer. The satellite will include a number of smaller student experiments as well as serve as a communication station for radio amateurs around the world.
The DISCO program has been created by Aalborg University, Aarhus University, University of Southern Denmark, IT University, the House of Natural Science and the Danish Industry Foundation as well as a number of space companies including GomSpace and Space Inventor to give students the opportunity to work with science and space technology in a practical way.
New possibilities
The launch of the first satellite has now been ordered from the company Momentus to take place next summer with a Falcon-9 rocket. The satellite will be a so-called CubeSat of 10x10x10 cm and with a mass of 1 kg. The satellite will contain a series of small experiments that the students are currently working on defining. One of the ideas is to investigate the possibility of using the same frequency as a regular wireless network, i.e. 2.4 GHz, to communicate between satellites. This could allow some of the subsequent DISCO satellites to send much larger amounts of data down to Earth. The data could e.g. be a picture that shows the development in the use of the Arctic regions as the ice around Greenland disappears.
To be used for teaching in both the universities and in high schools
“It is quite wild that I now, as part of my studies, am sitting and developing a communication unit for a satellite that I will help launching already next year,” says Aleksander Brøndum Bille, who is currently doing a bachelor project at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University. In his bachelor project, Aleksander will make a prototype of the ground stations that will be lent to Danish high schools after launch and thus give Danish high school students the opportunity to talk to the DISCO satellites.
Mission patch competition
All satellite missions have a cool mission patch and so must DISCO. We are therefore giving away an Astro Pi kit for the coolest mission patch for the DISCO program. For inspiration try the google mission patch. Astro Pi is a small Raspberry Pi computer developed by The Raspberry Pi Foundation in collaboration with the European Space Agency ESA. The Astro Pi kit consists of a Raspberry Pi 3, a Sence HAT card with a number of built-in measuring instruments, a camera and a power supply. The Astro Pi Kit enables you to develop experiments as they could be performed on a CubeSat.
Proposals for a mission patch for the DISCO program must be uploaded to the DISCO Facebook page before April 1 to enter the competition. https://www.facebook.com/DanishStudentCubeSatProgram
For more information:
Christoffer Karoff (AU)
karoff_at_geo.au.dk