The Portuguese nanosatellite will travel aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, which will take off from the SpaceX base, a company owned by billionaire, Elon Musk.
Its Portugal's second satellite into space, “Aeros”, a 4.5 kilo nanosatellite, which will observe the oceans from the International Space Station, a mission that has scientific support from the University of Algarve, among others.
The “Aeros” will be on board a Falcon 9 rocket, which will take off from the base of billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX company, in Vandenberg, in the United States, at 9:18 pm (Lisbon time) today.
The device, designed and operated by a national consortium of several companies and academic institutions, was launched 30 years after “PoSat-1”, the first Portuguese satellite, a 50 kilo microsatellite that entered Earth orbit in September 1993, but deactivated after a decade.
“Aeros” will be in Earth’s orbit at an altitude of 510 kilometres, slightly above the International Space Station.
Communications and collection of data and images will be carried out from the Santa Maria teleport, in the Azores, maintained by Thales Edisoft Portugal, the company that leads the national consortium.
The CEiiA engineering center, in Matosinhos, one of the partners and which built the nanosatellite, will process the data and images for the purposes of scientific studies.
The universities of Algarve, Porto and Minho, plus the Instituto Superior Técnico and Imar – Instituto do Mar, among others, provide scientific support for the mission, which is also joined by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States, through the MIT-Portugal cooperation program.
“Aeros”, which began work in 2020, represents an investment of 2.78 million euros, co-financed with 1.88 million euros by Feder – European Regional Development Fund.
Source https://postal.pt/
