UNITEC-1 was one of five small spacecraft that hitched rides on the H-IIA rocket used to launch Japan’s Akatsuki mission to Venus (Illustration: JAXA) The team with UNITEC-1 (Image: UNISEC)

A spacecraft built by students has been launched towards another planet for the first time, but it has fallen ominously silent.

The toaster-oven-sized cube called UNITEC-1 was launched towards Venus on 21 May. It hitched a ride on the same rocket that launched a half-tonne Venus orbiter named Akatsuki, which was built by Japan’s national space agency.


UNITEC-1 was designed and built largely by students, though the project was led by University of Tokyo professor Shinichi Nakasuka.

Its main purpose was to test computer chips for longevity in the harsh radiation and temperature environment of space. It carried six chips designed at different Japanese universities, which were to compete to see which one would last the longest. It also carried a radiation detector and a small camera.

Radio dishes in Japan briefly detected signals from UNITEC-1 after launch, but for reasons that are not yet clear, the spacecraft fell silent a few hours later and has not been heard from since.

The growing length of the silence has the mission team worried that the spacecraft has broken down. “But we are still working to receive the signal,” says team member Naomi Kurahara.

Though the UNITEC-1 mission may have failed, there will likely be similar attempts soon, says Robert Twiggs of Morehead State University in Kentucky, who pioneered the development of small satellites called CubeSats. “I believe it will be a trend in the near future,” he says. “I would expect to see students planning some missions now and attempts being made within the next five years.”

Exploration of space beyond Earth orbit has long been the preserve of government space agencies. A previous attempt to break out of that mould was the Beagle 2 Mars lander, which was designed and built by a consortium of universities and corporations, though it went silent on the day it was supposed to land in 2003 and was never heard from again.