WNISAT - Nanosatellite for North Arctic Routes and Atmosphere Monitoring

• Main Authors: Kim, Sangkyun, Eishima, Takashi, Miyashita, Naoki, Nojiri, Yuta, Nakamura, Yuya
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@USU 2010
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/smallsat/2010/all2010/13; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1196&context=smallsat

WNISAT is a 10kg weight nanosatellite of the sun-synchronous low earth orbit, currently being developed by Weathernews Inc. and AXELSPACE, and waiting for the launch with PSLV of India until the year of 2011. Weathernews Inc. is the largest private weather service company headquartered in Japan, which have many sea liners as their customers. Currently, the north arctic ice region reaches the lowest level every year, and sea liners have great interest for this because the north arctic routes means very short distance compare to other routes. Many approaches have been suggested for the monitoring of north arctic routes, and constellation of small satellites is one of the best ways considering efficiency. From this reason, Weathernews Inc, decided to develop small satellites in close collaboration with AXELSPACE. AXELSPACE is a university venture company established in 2008, all engineers have considerable experience in the field of small satellites of nano-class through many projects of their universities. There are two major missions for WNISAT, the first mission is earth observation of commercial use as like explained already. It is challenging to provide with the ice coverage information over high latitude oceans including NIR spectral ranges. And the second mission is atmosphere monitoring for environmental issue, the density of carbon dioxide in atmosphere using a laser application. The bus system of spacecraft and the first mission development are being led by AXELSPACE. The laser application for the second mission is under development by Weathernews Inc. The object of this WNISAT is to show the feasibility of nanosatellite for two major missions, especially the commercial use of small satellites of nano-class. After this WNISAT, several satellites are scheduled for the practical and commercial use within three or five years. At first, this paper will review progress in the development of WNISAT. And, the entire structure of spacecraft and the sub-systems are presented for the review and the detail explanation. After that, it will review the relevance of WNISAT's technology to advanced sensing concepts, reliable and efficient remote sensing and issues of atmospheric carbon dioxide content monitoring. Finally, future schedule after WNISAT is also briefly presented.