Skoltech Space CREI is pleased to invite you to the Seminar: “University of Tokyo’s Micro/nano/pico-satellite Activities －From Education to Practical Applications and Future Possibilities”.
Speaker: Dr. Shinichi Nakasuka, University of Tokyo,
Abstract
In June 2003, two Japanese universities, University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology completed the development of and launched the world first CubeSats “XI-IV” and “CUTE-1” using Russian rocket “ROCKOT” together with 4 other universities’ CubeSat. That was the icebreaking event of micro/nano/pico-satellite development activities in Japan. Triggered by the success of XI-IV and CUTE-1, many universities in Japan started their own satellite projects, mostly for educational objectives, and 37 Japanese university satellites have been launched till now. University of Tokyo already developed 8 satellites, and 7 of them were launched and have operated them successfully in orbit. Two CubeSat “XI-IV” and “XI-V (2005)” were primarily for space engineering education, but from the third satellite “PRISM,” we have been challenging towards more practical applications. PRISM aims to obtain about 30 m resolution Earth remote sensing images, which was actually achieved in 2009. Our fourth satellite “Nano-JASMINE,” which is now waiting for launch, has “Astrometry” mission to obtain very precise 3D map of more than 500,000 stars in space. From 2010, I organized nationwide micro-satellite program “Hodoyoshi Project” and through this program, three Earth remote sensing satellites “Hodoyoshi-1,3,4” were launched in 2014 by Dnepr, which showed excellent performance of taking Earth pictures of 6m, 40m and 240m ground resolutions, with which we are now seeking practical applications for agriculture, forestry, fishery, disaster monitoring, etc. Based on the bus component technologies developed in Hodoyoshi Project, in December 2014, we launched world first micro deep space probe “PROCYON,” which escaped Earth gravitational field and various observation and experiment were conducted successfully in deep space. In this way, University of Tokyo have been stepping up from education to practical applications of micro/nano/ pico-satellites, but the initial experiences of first two CubeSats have contributed a lot to our follow-on projects. We are now developing 3U size CubeSat again for remote sensing and communication missions. In my talk, I will show this history and discuss future possibilities of micro/nano/pico-satellites.
Biography
Prof. Nakasuka was born in Osaka in 1961. After graduating from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Tokyo in 1983 and receiving a Ph.D. in Aeronautics in 1988, he joined a computer manufacturing company and became involved in research involving artificial intelligence and automated manufacturing. In 1990, he became a lecturer at the University of Tokyo, then subsequently an assistant professor of the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, and a visiting research fellow in the United States. He has been a professor at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics since 2004. His research fields are space engineering and intelligence for space systems.
