The Austrian cubesat PRETTY has been orbiting our Earth since October at an altitude of approximately 570 kilometers. Since mid-February, the mini climate satellite has been transmitting its first scientific data after a “warm-up phase” of several weeks, as the relevant space supplier Beyond Gravity Austria has now announced.
The aim of the mission is to use the data to measure, for example, the height of the glacier ice on Greenland or the wave height of the oceans, and to analyze the influence of space weather on the lifespan of satellites. The data is being evaluated by an international team led by Hossein Nahavanchi from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Cubestat was built at TU Graz
The nanosatellite PRETTY (stands for: Passive Reflectometry and Dosimetry) was built at the Technical University (TU) Graz. The ground station is also located there and is managed by Manuela Wenger and Andreas Hörmer from the Institute for Communications Networks and Satellite Communications.
Revolving around the Earth at a speed of more than 25,000 km/h
From here, communication takes place with the climate observation satellite, which orbits the Earth at a speed of more than 25,000 kilometers per hour. And this also ensures that the collected information about climate change reaches the researchers.
“The data quality is as expected, we will still do the fine-tuning before the longer measurements start in two to three weeks,” Wenger told the APA.
Source: Krone
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