UCLSat, a satellite designed and built by UCL engineers and scientists, has been launched as part of an international mission. QB50 is a European Union-funded mission to support universities and schools from all over the world in designing, building and launching their own small, affordable satellites called CubeSats to collectively study the physics and chemistry of the thermosphere of Earth for the first time. The 36 CubeSats will disperse around Earth at a height of 375 - 500 km. They will be in orbit from between six months to two years while they run experiments before eventually falling back to Earth and burning up on entry. Each CubeSat team will have a ground station collecting the data from the satellites, which will be analysed by scientists globally for a variety of research projects.
www.qb50.eu
www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-stu...