BRITE-PL Heweliusz, the third Polish satellite will be launched on a Chinese CZ-4 rocket. The launch might happen before the end of this year.
This announcement has been posted at the BRITE-PL website. Heweliusz, together with its sister satellite Lem are the Polish contribution to the astronomical BRITE project.
The Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences chose the Chinese launcher for the satellite on the 15th of July. As for now, Heweliusz is undergoing the final integration stage and scientific payload testing.
The Lem satellite should be launched on a Russian Dnepr rocket, also by the end of this year and after a long series of delays.
BRITE-PL is the name of a Polish scientific satellite project which consists of two satellites: BRITE-PL Lem and BRITE-PL Heweliusz. The two are part of a bigger scientific BRITE (BRIght-star Target Explorer) consortium. All together, six BRITE satellites are to be placed into orbit – two of them (Canadian UniBRITE and Austrian TUGSAT-1) have already been launched on 25th of February onboard a Indian PSLV rocket.
The first Polish satellite was PW-Sat, a student Cubesat project launched on the maiden Vega flight from Kourou in February 2012.
(CBK)
{module [346]}
