Summary of development and testing of UNIFORM-1 microsatellite

UNIFORM project had started in November 2010 to lead realization of sustainable space industry in Japan, where miniaturized satellites have been popular and its technology is relatively well developed while most had been focusing only on R&D purpose. UNIFORM project has been aiming to make community to share value among countries interested in space technology by cooperating to construct microsatellites, ground station and its constellation system for practical utilization. UNIFORM-1 is the first microsatellite of this project and forest fire monitoring was selected as the mission. Although obvious purpose of this satellite is to monitor forest fire, it is developed for some other unique purposes in unique context. There are another microsatellite development project in parallel with partially sharing common human resource so the system is designed to share common bus system to minimize effort while the mission is different each other. Also in order to make this activity sustainable, it is important to develop supply chain without relying too much on existing component venders, which are normally for existing big companies. Therefore, whole system is modularly designed with physically and functionally independent components developed by some new manufacturers. Development members closely cooperated to build BBM and EM for both project and shared test result, and software for on-board computer is mostly in common. UNIFORM-1 was successfully passed acceptance test and launched on May 24th, 2014. It will need a lot more work to make it useful by involving more countries and increasing the number of satellite for constellation, but it has been acquiring some forest fire data from orbit.