ZimSat-1 Satellite

ZimSat-1
ZimSat-1
ZimSat-1
ZimSat-1
ZimSat-1
ZimSat-1
ZimSat-1
Satellite ZimSat-1 (BIRDS-5)
Spacecraft type CubeSat
Units or mass 1U
Status Reentry 2023-05-16. Was semi-operational? (News from February 2023 about high rotation rates and slowing down. Two news about transmitting data from June 2023, 120 packets per pass, but spacecraft had decayed by then. No reception reports found on SatNOGS or Twitter.)
Launched 2022-11-07
NORAD ID 54537
Deployer J-SSOD (JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer)
Launcher Antares (NG-18)
Deployment Deployed from ISS on 2022-12-02
Organization Kyushu Institute of Technology
Institution University
Entity type Academic / Education
Nation (HQ) Zimbabwe
Nation (AIT) Japan
Manufacturer AIVT by Kyushu Institute of Technology
Launch brokerer JAXA
Oneliner

Educational and amateur radio mission.

Description

Build Uganda and Zimbabwe’s first satellite while improving the standardized bus system for future missions, giving continuity to the satellite development of Japan and previous missions from BIRDS-1,2,3 and 4.

Primary Objective(s) 

  • To design, build, test, launch and operate Uganda and Zimbabwe’s first satellite 
  • To demonstrate the multispectral camera and DLP feasibility on 1U CubeSat
  • To give continuity to three missions; attitude visualisation, Imaging classification Mission (IMG-CLS) and Store & Forward (SF- WARD) 
  • To demonstrate Particle Instrument for Nano-satellite(PINO)
  • To serve the Amateur radio community with APRS-Digipeater mission (APRS-DP) 

Secondary Objective(s) 

  • To give continuity to 2U structure for further projects
  • To demonstrate on-board image processing and classification 
  • To demonstrate mounting of three Raspberry Pi on a 1U CubeSat
Results

2023-02-19: ZimSat-1 ready to transmit data. Will begin transmitting data from space next month after undergoing orbital stabilization.

2023-06-04: ZimSat-1 has started collecting data after undergoing orbital stabilization. Now sending and receving images of specific areas around Zimbabwe.

2023-06-05: Painos Gweme, Reports Progress on ZimSat-1. ZimSat-1 is operational and has commenced performing the downlink and uplink functions after a successful orbital stabilisation.

All the BIRDS-5 CubeSats decayed in May 2023, thus the timing of some of the news is late.

Sources [1] [2]
Photo sources [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Keywords Open-source, First CubeSat of country
On the same launch

Last modified: 2024-05-29

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Created by Erik Kulu

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