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Mayak solar reflector satellite


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Wikipedia — Mayak (spacecraft) (in Russian)

Mayak (Russian Маяк ‘lighthouse’) is a Cubesat 3U-sized spacecraft designed by young engineers of Moscow Polytechnic University. It is the first Russian crowdfunded spacecraft with a record low cost of 2 million roubles (€29,000, $33,000).

The satellite is planned to be launched on 14 July 2017 from the Site 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. It will be put into a 600 km orbit using a Soyuz-2.1a rocket with a Fregat-M upper stage alongside 72 other satellites (Canopus-V-IK, Zvezda, four SatByul Co. LTD satellites, two Corvus-BC, AISSat-3, Lemur+, Tyvark, MKA-N, Flock 2k).

The spacecraft contains a solar reflector made of metallized film 20 times thinner than a human hair. After getting into orbit, it will be deployed and form a tetrahedron. For 25 days, Mayak will become the brightest shimmering star in the night sky with the apparent magnitude of −10 (1.6 times brighter than the Iridium flare (magnitude −9.5)). The Mayak solar reflector is intended to be a reference object for space object apparent magnitude estimations. During the tracking of the flight of the satellite in upper Earth atmosphere, new data on the gas density at the given altitudes will be acquired. The flight can also be considered as an aerobraking device flight test. Such devices may be used for deorbiting space junk in the future.

The spacecraft includes:

  • solar reflector
  • reflective surfaces
  • reflector container
  • deploying mechanism
  • control system
  • chemical electricity source
  • propulsion system
  • load-bearing unit

Dimensions: 3 × 3 × 2.45 m
Orbital altitude: 600 km
Orbital inclination: 98°

Spacecraft 3D models on the project website (in Russian).

 

Maximum apparent magnitude values of various objects in the sky
Sun −26.7
Moon −12.7
Mayak spacecraft −10
Iridium flare −9.5
Venus −4.67
International Space Station −4
Jupiter −2.94
Mars −2.91
Mercury −2.45
Sirius −1.47
Canopus −0.72

 

(Sorry for my English)

Edited by Teilnehmer
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45 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:

I'm fine with this but I am concerned about the precedent that this sets. A dozen or more of these could seriously affect ground-based amateur and professional astronomy....

I suppose it also depends on how long until they reenter.

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9 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

I'm fine with this but I am concerned about the precedent that this sets. A dozen or more of these could seriously affect ground-based amateur and professional astronomy....

This ! (posting in thread to complain now)

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Is that meant to be a retroreflector or is that a prism ? Is it going to only use sunlight ? If so, then I presume it's in terminator SSO ?

Does anyone have the common groundtrack for such things ? Would be good to know that something weird is happening and they know what it is.

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2 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Will it only be visible from a single point at a time?

It's like iridium flares, I presume. There will be a ground path of the reflected light onto the surface. Near the center line, very bright, less so off-axis.

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  • 3 weeks later...
22 hours ago, Teilnehmer said:

Has anyone seen this Mayak in the sky?

No not yet, i would love to see it, but light pullotion, and the fact that i cant find a way to track it is making it very difficult.

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On 7/5/2017 at 8:57 PM, tater said:

I suppose it also depends on how long until they reenter.

It is lower than Skylab and has about the worst possible aerodynamics for staying up (Skylab, thanks to its shear size, was relatively low drag).  The op even points out that its drag 'can be considered an aerobraking test'.

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4 hours ago, tater said:

Looks like fear of it as a bright object were unfounded. Has anyone seen it?

One guy imaged it and said it was somewhere between mag 5-7, so the sail hasn't deployed. We don't know if it hasn't deployed yet on purpose or if it simply failed.

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Well, I'm in contact with Mayak's team and they are not certain about cube-sat fate. There is small hope that sail was deployed but not in expected configuration, so flashes still can be relatively bright (~1 mag) but rare (below 10% probability to spot per transit per observer). They monitor TLE and hope observation of orbit params evolution (Mayak should teroreticaly be the one that will lose apo and peri height faster) will allow to identify Mayak in cube-sat group in which Mayak's was deployed.

Unfortunately sat doesn't have any telemetry suite and ground observation is only source of information. Where are few reports about flashes from 2017-042F sat up to 2m brightness, and I personally seen one flash ~3m but there is no certainty that this is the Mayak.

Latest press release from Mayak's team (in Russian) is here: https://geektimes.ru/post/291189/

 

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