Comments: MASat-1 (from the words Magyar and Satellite, the first meaning Hungarian in Hungarian) is the first indigenous Hungarian satellite, developed and built by students at the Technical University of Budapest. The satellite provides telemetric data as well as VGA resolution color images at the 70 cm amateur radio wavelength (437.345 MHz frequency) received at the tracking center at Budapest. The center was tested on 31 March, 2009 with the help of Charles Simonyi on board the International Space Station. (more...)

Description:
Several cubesats were launched on 13 February 2012 from Kourou at 10:00 UT by the new European launch vehicle Vega. The cubesats each have a mass of 1 kg and were developed by University students from five different countries. E-st@r an Italian cubesat will demonstrate an active three-axis attitude determination and control system including an inertial measurement unit. UniCubeSat GG an Italian cubesat will deploy two booms to demonstrate gravity-gradient stabilization on a small satellite. MaSat-1 a Hungarian cubesat will demonstrate a power conditioning system, a transceiver and an onboard data handling system. PW-Sat 1 a Poland cubesat will test a deployable atmospheric drag augmentation device to de-orbit satellites and reduce the issue of orbital debris. Robusta a French cubesat will study the effect of radiation on electronic components based on bipolar transistors for comparison with its own degradation models. Xatcobeo a Spanish cubesat will test a software-defined reconfigurable radio and an ionizing radiation measurement system.
The CubeSats will be deployed into a high inclination, low Earth orbit and is expected to have a natural orbital lifetime of up to four years. (more...)