CUTE-1.7 APD

CUTE -1.7 APD ( Cubical Tokyo Tech Engineering satellite 1.7, also OSCAR 56 ) was a Japanese small satellite, which was built as a student project at the Technical University of Tokyo and started on Uchinoura Space Center.

Construction

The satellite has been developed according to the CubeSat standard and has the shape of a cube with an edge length of 10 centimeters. Many commercially available components such as a Hitachi NPD 20JWL PDA as a control computer and a USB hub were used for sensor data acquisition equipment.

It additionally carrying an experiment for observing the orbit of charged particles, which is based on an avalanche photodiode. Therefore this name reflects the APD in the type designation.

The successor to CUTE -1.7 APD II ( OSCAR 65) was launched on 28 April 2008 with an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.