ZimSat-1 Spacecraft - Nanosats Database

Spacecraft name	ZimSat-1 (BIRDS-5)
Form factor	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. IAC2024 abstract implies that it is operational.)
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
Organisation	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.
Notes
Sources	[1] [2] [3]
Photo sources	[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Keywords	Open-source, First CubeSat of country
On the same launch	PearlAfricaSat-1 TAKA ZimSat-1 SpaceTuna 1

Last modified: 2024-12-19