Ricerc@Sapienza

LEDSAT (LED-based small SATellite) is a 1-Unit CubeSat project conceived by the Sapienza - Space Systems and Space Surveillance Laboratory (S5Lab) research team at Sapienza - University of Rome, with the collaboration of the University of Michigan (USA). The project has been accepted for the European Space Agency Fly Your Satellite! Programme, it is under development with the support of the Italian Space Agency (in the framework of the IKUNS project) and it will be launched within 2020.

Optical observations are intensively applied to space debris monitoring for the achievement of orbit determination and for gathering information on their attitude motion, even if constrained by light conditions. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) installed on the external surfaces of a satellite could increase the visibility interval to the whole eclipse time. LEDSAT (LED-based small SATellite) is a 1-Unit CubeSat aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of LEDs for the improvement of space debris optical monitoring algorithms.