FrontierSat
Canadian satellite focused on atmospheric science
FrontierSat is an atmospheric science and technology demonstration space mission in the form of a 3U CubeSat-type small satellite. The spacecraft was developed by "CalgaryToSpace", a team of University of Calgary students. Its development was supported by University of Calgary, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency's Fly Your Satellite! program. The satellite was launched on May 3, 2026 on the Falcon 9's CAS500-2 rideshare mission. Once in orbit, it successfully started transmitting beacon data.
01Payload
FrontierSat carries two payloads. The Mini Plasma Imager (MPI), based on the Thermal Ion Imager (TII) instruments of ESA's Swarm mission, is designed to study the aurora-like STEVE phenomenon. The camera-monitored Deployable Composite Lattice Boom (DCLB) will test boom deployment technology.
Mini Plasma Imager
The Mini Plasma Imager (MPI) flown on FrontierSat was developed at the University of Calgary. It is a charged-particle anemometer. Within the instrument, an electrostatic analyzer sorts incoming ions by their kinetic energy per unit charge. An IonCCD, a form of charge-coupled device, detects the ions. The instrument outputs 32 frames per second, generating a raw telemetry stream of approximately 5100 bytes per second.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “FrontierSat”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Optical Steve.jpg by Elfiehall, CC BY-SA 4.0
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