Overview
- UNLP’s engineering faculty has prepared USAT-1 for a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg, with the university hosting a public live broadcast and technical briefings to follow the event.
- Faculty, students, fellows and researchers at the Centro Tecnológico Aeroespacial and SENyT designed and built the full 3U CubeSat platform and its custom multi-antenna GPS receiver in-house.
- USAT-1 is a roughly 3 kg, 10 x 10 x 34 cm CubeSat whose payload uses GNSS signals to demonstrate measurements of atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity plus soil parameters such as moisture, altimetry, surface roughness and vegetation.
- The project cost about $70,000 for materials and scholarships funded from CTA’s technology-transfer revenue and about $100,000 for launch services, paid mostly by UNLP with a government subsidy covering the remainder, and it received technical support from CONAE, CNEA and IAR.
- Beyond training engineers, the mission shows how Argentine universities can build low-cost, end-to-end satellites while relying on commercial foreign launch providers, a dependence that shapes access to space for local research groups.