Hoots, mon, we have a problem: First satellite made in Scotland to launch next year



Satellite made in Glasgow's Maryhill

Three linked 'cubes' will orbit Earth and radio to ground

'Cubesat' vehicle is just 10cm by 10cm

Expected to launch in 2013

An unlikely entrant is about to join the space race next year, as Scotland launches its first home-built satellite.

The country's first satellite may not cause too much jealousy at Nasa - the UKube-1 satellite is made of three 10cm by 10cm cubes, slightly more modest than the International Space Station.



UKube-1 is being built at the West of Scotland Science Park in Maryhill, Glasgow by a local company, Clyde Space.



Clydespace's UKUbe-1 satellite will be the first satellite to launch from Scotland - the hi-tech vehicle is expected to launch next year

Gateway to the stars? Workers at Clydespace claim that few people believe that they are making satellites in Glasgow's Maryhill (pictured)

ClydeSpace's Systems engineer Steve Greenland says, ' People often ask me what my job is and I tell them that I'm building satellites in Maryhill'



‘Sometimes they don't believe it. Sometimes they laugh at me.’

Clyde Space has made dozens of tiny 'CubeSat' vehicles for other companies - 10cm by 10cm cubes.

Chief Executive Craig Clark says, ‘A typical CubeSat mission was a student-built satellite that would maybe go beep or try something out that didn't cost a lot of money.'

But the company is to link three cubes together to create UKube-1 - which will be the first complete satellite to be assembled by Clyde Space.

It's part of a pilot programme from the UK Space Agency to test new technologies in space.

Mechanical design engineer Steven Kirk is well aware of its particular significance for Clyde Space - and for Scotland.



‘It's our first full platform,’ he said. ‘So by demonstrating this we can demonstrate that we can build a full satellite. We'll have the pedigree.’



CubeSat is expected to enter orbit next year.





To boldly go: Scientists hope to have UKube-1, which stands for United Kingdom Universal Bus Experiment, in orbit later this year



The underlying CubeSat concept came originally from America - to create a satellite 10cm by 10cm by 10cm.

More than 600 CubeSats have been launched so far. The Glasgow firm has made components for 40% of them.



Examples include NASA's GeneSat-1, a 5 kilogram CubeSat which is carrying bacteria inside a miniature laboratory and NASA's Firefly mission which is studying the relationship between lightning and mysterious bright flashes of gamma radiation in the upper atmosphere of our planet.



The low-Earth orbit of CubeSats is also ideal for disaster monitoring and Earth sciences, as the lower a satellite orbits, the less time it takes to complete a revolution of the Earth.



