Top.Mail.Ru
The first Far-Eastern university satellite has made its 20000th orbit of the Earth.

News and events

The Amur State University nanosatellite AMGU-1 (AMURSAT) has orbited the Earth 20000 times. The small spacecraft started its anniversary orbit of the Earth on the 16th of February at 3:25 a.m. local time.

AMGU-1 (AMURSAT) is the first Far-Eastern university satellite; nine Russian universities have launched their own small satellites before. The Amur satellite was launched on the 5th of July in 2019, at the Vostochnyi spaceport. The AMSU satellite was a secondary payload to an Earth remote-sensing machine "Meteor-M" #2-2. It was made in collaboration with the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lomonosov Moscow State University. AMGU-1 (AMURSAT) is a small spacecraft of the 3U CubeSat type. Its size is 10x10x34 centimeters, its weight is 3 kilograms.

The satellite is equipped with a device "Photon-Amur" developed by AMSU, a charged particle detector "DeCor" developed by SINP (Scientific Institute of Nuclear Power) MSU and a technological demonstrator of the A3H-B receiver. "Photon-Amur" allowed the university team to test solar batteries with details made from barium disilicide. These superfine layers were formed in the laboratory of Surface Physics of the AMSU Research and Education Center.

AMSU satellite has already been in orbit for 3.5 years. It continues to transmit telemetry to the Earth. Over the years, scientists have managed to obtain data about space weather on the low earth orbit using the satellite. The data are received in different parts of the country, including the Amur Mission Control Center in AMSU.

Now the spacecraft orbits the Earth in 94.5 minutes. Its highest altitude (Apogee) is 512.8 km, and the lowest one (Perigee) is 488.7 km.

The university is currently working on another small spacecraft, international this time. AMSU is a mediator in the Russian-Chinese project on the creation of "Druzhba ASRTU" small spacecraft. Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Moscow Aviation Institute, Samara State University, Ural Federal University, the Harbin Institute of Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, the Beijing Institute of Technology are the members of the consortium. The satellite is to be launched in May 2023.