Courtesy
The first satellite built in Costa Rica and throughout Central America will be sent to space in 2018, with the objective of collecting data related to the emission of carbon dioxide.
On the morning of October 23rd, the Central American Association of Aeronautics and Space (ACAE) and the Costa Rican Technological Institute (TEC) announced that the assembly phase of the satellite, called the Irazú Project, is now finished.
It will now be shipped to Japan, where flight tests will be conducted and then scheduled to ship to space during 2018.
Today is a historic day for our country and Central America… We are demonstrating that national talent has the technical and professional level required to participate in the high levels of the country’s aerospace value chain,”
said Carlos Alvarado, president of the ACAE.
For three weeks, four TEC engineers checked the systems and assembled the pieces that today give life to Irazú Project. This will be received in Japan by two other Costa Rican students residing in Japan and the renowned scientist Mengu Cho at the Kyutech Technological Institute in Fukuoka.
It will be subjected to studies that simulate the extreme conditions of the launch and the orbital environment in the most realistic way, with the intention of verifying its operation and thus ensuring its optimal functioning in space,”
said Luis Diego Monge, project manager of ACAE.
The company MOOG Medical joined the initiative to provide a “clean” room in Alajuela, which met the necessary conditions to avoid contaminating the parts with impurities that could hinder the process.
The project will arrive in space to gather data on Costa Rica’s efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions through carbon sequestration in the forests.
The satellite will go over Costa Rica twice a day and it will measure the growth of trees, in order to extract information and estimate the levels of carbon fixation. The data will arrive at the TEC Headquarters station in Cartago.