An Educational CubeSat Mission for Detecting Algae Blooming in Coastal and Inland Water Bodies

UFSAT-l is an educational CubeSat mission funded by CONAE with the purpose of training young researchers from CONAE and graduate students currently enrolled in master and doctoral programs taught at Gulich Institute. The mission includes developing a payload consisting on a multi-spectral cam-era designed for providing applications suitable for performing research and monitoring algae blooms which could occur on water reservoirs, coastal zones and coastline waters; such as those found in Argentina. Specifically, there is especial interest in Harmful Algae Blooms caused by species which can produce toxins that accumulate in food webs and/or because of mass mortality of fauna due to hipoxia caused by the degradation of high microalgal biomass. Being an educational mission, both the graduate students and the young researchers will have hands on involvement on manufacturing, assembling, integrating and testing the payload as well as developing the applications and operating the spacecraft once in orbit.