© LESIA / Observatoire de Paris-PSL PicSat, with its unfolded antennas, in the lab’s vacuum chamber.
PicSat will be launched into Earth orbit on 12 January 2018 to study the star Beta Pictoris, its exoplanet and its famous debris disk, thanks to a small telescope 5 cm in diameter. The nanosatellite has been designed and built in a record time of just three years by scientists and engineers at the Paris Observatory and the CNRS, with support from the Université PSL, the French space agency CNES, the European Research Council and the MERAC Foundation. It is no bigger than three apples stacked upon each other, or rather three cubes, each 10 centimetres in size. It is not heavier than a cat (3.5 kg). It uses about 5 Watt of power, equivalent to that of an economical light bulb. Its telescope is only five centimetres in diameter, much like that of a young amateur astronomer. And yet, this nanosatellite seeks to improve our knowledge of the Beta Pictoris star system, a real “star” in the sky of the Southern Hemisphere.
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