South Africa’s ZACube-2, the continent’s most advanced nanosatellite to date, has been successfully launched into space.
The ZACube-2 took off yesterday (27 Deember) at 04:07am with the Russian Soyuz Kanopus mission from the Vostochny spaceport. The cube-satellite left the earth together with small satellites from the US, Japan, Spain, and Germany and is orbited as secondary payload in a launch mission designed for realtime monitoring of natural and manmade disasters and other emergencies.
Minister of Science and Technology Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane comments that the launch of ZACube-2 represents a significant milestone in the nation’s ambition to becoming a key player in the innovative utilisation of space science and technology in responding to government priority areas.
The ZACube-2 will provide remote sensing and communication services to South Africa and the region.
The satellite is a technology demonstrator for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) that will provide critical information for our oceans economy. It will monitor the movement of ships along the South African coastline with its automatic identification system (AIS) payload.
“This satellite will help us monitor our ocean traffic as part of our oceans economy and also monitor veld fires and provide near real-time fire information ensuring a quick response time by disaster management teams. Science is indeed helping us resolve the challenges of our society. I want to congratulate our space team for great work and this achievement,” says Kubayi-Ngubane.
She adds: “I am particularly excited that the satellite was developed by some of our youngest and brightest minds under a programme representing our diversity, in particular black students and young women.”
Weighing just 4kg, the ZACube-2 is South Africa’s second nanosatellite to be launched into space and three times the size of its predecessor, TshepisoSat. It is regarded as the continent’s most advanced cube satellite and is in fact a precursor to the MDASat – a constellation of nine nanosatellites that will be developed to provide cutting-edge very high frequency data exchange communication systems to the maritime industry.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has invested R16,5-million at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) for the project in support of Operation Phakisa. The DST’s entity, the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), in cooperation with the University of Montpellier, the French Embassy and the Paris Chamber of Commerce, manages the project.
In April this year, Kubayi-Ngubane, attended the send-off ceremony and met the team young people who worked on the Zacube-2 at CPUT. At the time, the nanosatellite was scheduled for launch from India, in June 2018. Excess capacity induced by primary and secondary payloads on India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, resulted in a delay and an alternative arrangement was made.
The ZACube-2 will be given a new name soon, following a national satellite naming competition launched in April by the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA), an entity of the DST. SAASTA received over 300 entries from Grade 4-12 learners. The results have been finalised and the new name of the nanosatellite will be announced in due course.
Cubesats are extremely small satellites, in the form of 10cm cubes and with a mass of up to 1kg (although there are some made up of two or three such cubes). Developed originally in the US, they are becoming increasingly popular with universities and technological institutes around the world, because of their considerable educational benefits.
Cubesats provide both hands-on experience for engineers and technologists in their design and construction and, once in orbit, the data needed to support scientific experiments and projects.