Politech.1 selected for ESA launch program

The UPV satellite based on Emxys Naosat Platform has been accepted for ESA Vega Launch Initiative.

The Politech.1 satellite under development by Emxys for the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia has ben accepted into the European Space Agency’s Fly Your Satellite Program. During this year and the next one the UPV and Emxys will participate in design reviews and test campaigns to be hold at the European Space and Technology Center (the technology center of the European Space Agency) facilities in The Netherlands. After the test campaigns the satellite will be launched during the year 2014, a schedule that suits Politech.1 planned project.

The Politech.1 is one of six successful teams, out of a total of 17 entrants from ESA members states, which submitted proposals to the Fly Your Satellite program.

Ana Vidal, UPV’s Full Professor, and Francisco Garcia de Quirós, Emxys CTO, attended to the kick off of the activities conducting to the test campaign and launch of Politech.1 last 3rd and 4th of July. Five other teams from France, Belgium, Canada, Italy, and Denmark, selected for the ESA Fly Your Satellite program attended the meeting as well.

Fly Your Satellite is an initiative of the ESA Education and Knowledge Management Office, which is focused on CubeSat projects run by university students. It builds on the successful CubeSats for the Vega Maiden Flight pilot programme, which culminated in 2012 with the launch of seven university student-built CubeSats on board the first Vega launch from the ESA launch facility in Kourou, French Guyana.

UPV’s Politech.1 satellite is based on Emxys NAOSat platform that has been selected by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia for its first technology demonstration Space mission. The mission will inject in Low Earth Orbit three experimental payloads from different UPV research teams – a telescope camera for Earth Imaging, a high-data rate microwave transmitter, and a demonstrator of optical fiber temperature sensors. Besides, Politech.1 will also include an experiment from NASA to study the nature of the upper atmosphere.

The Universidad Politécnica de Valencia is a Spanish university located in Valencia, with a focus on science and technology. It was founded in 1968 as the Higher Polytechnic School of Valencia and became a university in 1971, but some of its schools are more than 100 years old.