INTRODUCTION

The first Slovak satellite skCUBE is ready to take its journey into outer space. It is a good time now to look back at the successes and obstacles, which we had to pass during this project. The story of the satellite began already in 2009, but officially we started to work on it in 2011. After several successful missions of our stratospheric probe flights codenamed JULO [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8], we acquired a desire to go higher and conquer the boundary of outer space. The satellite skCUBE started to be our big dream. We faced the following question many times: ‘Does it make sense to work on this project? We have enough space debris in orbit already and the “bread won’t get cheaper”’.

Yes, we could talk about this for a long time, but let us list here several major aspects, which proved to us the potential of such this project: i) knowledge – during the construction of the satellite we did it our own way. We designed and built printed circuit boards, drew a 3D satellite model, programmed software, developed sensors, measuring methods, testing tools and calibration methods. The satellite know-how is now ours. This ‘painful’ way taught us a lot, because we had to overcome a lot of specific problems; ii) public outreach – Slovakia is now an ESA cooperating state and skCUBE confirms that we belong in this exclusive community after all. We want to convince young people to go and study technical fields because it pays off; iii) science – our satellite will contribute significantly to science as well. We developed a radio waves detector, which will listen to radio waves at very low frequencies (3-30 kHz) generated by terrestrial lightning and potentially also Earth’s magnetosphere.

The space sector has become a part of every day life for people in many countries in the world. It is present in many space spin-off technologies, such as: GPS, weather satellites and satellite TV. The power of most of the biggest economies in the world is tied to the business with knowledge. Therefore, investments in education and science are the only way to bring Slovakia to this ‘elite club’. The space program in Slovakia has to start somehow. We think that cubesats are an appropriate way to get us there. It is not just student debris in space, but also an ideal way of gaining the know-how and experience in making relatively cheap experiments in space.

SATELLITE

In the following sections we will introduce the satellite from a technical perspective and describe our main innovations.