e.Cube Spacecraft - Nanosats Database

Satellite name	e-CUBE (e.Cube)
Spacecraft type	CubeSat
Units or mass	6U
Status	not launched, expected in 2026
Launcher	not launched
Entity name	D-Orbit
Institution	Company
Entity	Commercial
Nation	Italy
Manufacturer	AIVT by ?
Operator	?
Partners	Politecnico di Milano, University of Padova, Intelligentia
Oneliner	Advancement of technologies and methodologies dedicated to space debris mitigation and remediation.
Description	The e.Cube mission aims at the advancement of technologies and methodologies dedicated to space debris mitigation and remediation to increase spacecraft autonomy in performing Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres (CAMs), to support space debris modelling with in-orbit collected data about non-trackable fragment objects, and to characterise the atmosphere for more accurate re-entry predictions and the thermomechanical loads experienced by the spacecraft during re-entry. A 6U CubeSat will be deployed in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) where the operational phase will be dedicated to three experiments. During the first phase, the autonomous CAM experiment will be carried out, consisting of several in-flight CAM tests for simulated close approaches with a virtual debris. A particle detection device, exposed in the frontal side of the spacecraft, will collect over the time of one year the highest amount possible of sub-millimetre particles to be used to validate in-use statistical distributions of non-trackable objects. Finally, during the last phase of the mission an End-Of-Life (EOL) manoeuvre will be implemented. During the re-entry phase an experiment through the data collector will characterise the thermosphere in the region below 200 km. The data and results of the e.Cube mission will be used to validate tools and techniques currently used within the space debris community.
Sources	[1]

Last modified: 2023-10-21