UPSat (QB50 GR02) (original) (raw)

UPSat [UPSat Team]

UPSat (University of Patras Satellite) is a Greek 2U-CubeSat constructed by University of Patras and Libre Space Foundation part of the QB50 mission with ID GR-02.

UPSat mission aspires to be the first completely open source satellite ever launched, manufactured in Greece, minimizing the usage of COTS components to the absolute minimum. On that scope all subsystems of the satellite are designed from scratch in an open source software and hardware way. The return of investment towards an open source development way, is expected to be significant, kickstarting a new knowledge and building ecosystem around space engineering and technologies.

As a payload for QB50, the satellite carries a multineedle Langmuir probe (mNLP) sampling the electron density of the space around it.

The satellite was launched with the bulk of the QB50 constellation to the ISS in 2017, from where the satellite was deployed on 18 May 2017.