Thirty years later, this Monday, Portugal launches into space its second satellite, Eros, which will observe the oceans from the “surroundings” of the International Space Station, the astronauts’ “home” and laboratory.
The 4.5-kilogram Eros nanosatellite will be aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, which will take off from SpaceX’s Vandenberg base in the United States at 9:18 p.m. (Lisbon time).
The device, developed and operated by a national consortium of several companies and academic institutions, was launched 30 years after PoSat-1, the first Portuguese microsatellite weighing 50 kg, which entered Earth orbit in September 1993 but was deactivated ten years later. .
Eros will be in Earth orbit at an altitude of 510 kilometers, just above the International Space Station. Communications and data and image collection will take place from the Santa Maria teleport in the Azores, operated by Thales Edisoft Portugal, the company leading the national consortium.
The CEiiA Engineering Center in Matosinhos, one of the partners that built the nanosatellite, will process the data and images for scientific research purposes. The Universities of the Algarve, Porto and Minho, the Higher Technical Institute and the Imar do Mar Institute, among others, are providing scientific support to the mission, which has also been joined by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US through the MIT-Portugal Cooperation Program.
Eros, which began operations in 2020, represents an investment of 2.78 million euros, co-financed with 1.88 million euros by the Federation – the European Regional Development Fund. The launch of the nanosatellite can be observed in Portugal, at the CEiiA event in Matosinhos.