Two proposals selected for the 2nd GRSS Student Grand Challenge

Oct 17, 2019

A jury composed of scientists from NASA, ESA and UAE Space Agency has evaluated the proposals received to develop an Earth Observation Payload for a 3U CubeSat mission to be developed at the National Space Science and Technology Center, UAE. After the evaluation process two proposals have been selected.

1. The student team from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, supervised by Prof. Juan Ramos Castro proposed developing a combination of payloads in small form factor for CubeSats. These include an L-band radiometer for monitoring ice thickness and soil moisture, a multispectral camera for monitoring vegetation, and a software defined radio for monitoring Radio Frequency Interference along with a deployable antenna system.

2. The student team from Telkom University, Indonesia supervised by Prof. Edwar proposed development of a multispectral camera and a miniature spectrometer for atmospheric sensing.

In addition, the student team from Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan will be partially funded. The team proposed to develop smart cameras with onboard classification capability to automatically detect the best quality images for downlinking.

The teams will receive financial support from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society to develop the payloads for integration into a CubeSat. All the student teams will closely interact with the engineers at the National Space Science and Technology Center during the development. The satellite is expected to be launched in 2021.