Chinese CubeSats to participate in international study project
Five Chinese-made microsatellites will be sent into space in the near future as part of a proposed international network of 50 satellites that will study the lower thermosphere, a layer of the Earth's atmosphere.
The QB50 project, an initiative by the Von Karman Institute in Brussels and funded by the European Commission, will simultaneously launch 50 CubeSats - microsatellites composed of cube-shaped units - on a single launch vehicle.
"The project has set records for the number of participant countries in international microsatellite projects and the number of satellites carried by a single rocket," said Zhou Jun, director of the Shaanxi Engineering laboratory for Microsatellites at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, the capital of the northwestern province.
