The UPMSat-1 project
On July 7, 1995, the launch of the first Spanish university satellite UPM-Sat 1 took place from French Guiana. It traveled into space as secondary payload on flight V75 of an Ariane IV-40 launcher, whose main customer was the Helios military satellite (launch video).
Since then, UPM-Sat 1, whose operational life in orbit has been 213 days, has followed a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of 670 kilometers, completing one revolution around the Earth every 98 minutes.
UPM-Sat 1 is a scientific and technology demonstration satellite in orbit, but the primary facet of this project has been its educational nature. Given its fundamentally educational nature, the first objective of the project was the satellite itself: it was about verifying the capacity of the Polytechnic University of Madrid to design, develop, build, test, integrate, and operate a space device with modest features, but which It would preserve in its execution all the complexity of a complete spatial system.
In addition to this main objective, there were others related to the use of liquid bridges as space accelerometers and, after reaching an agreement with the Center for Space Research and Technology of the European Space Agency (ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands) to use the satellite UPM-Sat 1 as a platform for technology demonstration in orbit, with new solar panel technologies.
