CASTRA: 7th Nano-Satellite Symposium and the 4th UNISEC-Global Meeting

The 7th Symposium & 4th Meeting, including the 4th Mission Idea Contest and the Deorbit Device Competition will be jointly held on October 18 – 23, 2016, at Hotel "Longoz", Sports and Wellness Resort “Kamchia", BULGARIA

THE TOPIC this year is - Micro/nano/pico Satellites: Innovation in Architectures, Technologies and Players.

Engineers, researchers, scientists, students, users and business persons from all over the world will participate in the symposium and discuss together to further enlarge and strengthen the micro/nano/pico-satellite community.

Recent advancement of micro/nano/pico-satellites technologies and development process has made these very small satellites more and more important and indispensable tools for space development and utilisation. Their characteristics of enabling low cost and quick development is realising innovative and challenging missions, including Earth monitoring, information gathering, deep space explorations, communications, education or even more, for personal use, as well as involvement of more diverse players in satellite projects and applications. Actually many small business enterprises are appearing recently resulted from academic small satellite projects. During the last two years, over 200 micro/nano/pico satellites were launched into various orbits using a variety of launch vehicles, and we can predict this trend will get even stronger in the future. We sincerely hope that many engineers, researchers, scientists, students, users and business persons from all over the world will participate in the symposium and discuss together to further enlarge and strengthen the micro/nano/pico-satellite community.

SCOPE:The following list of topics for micro/nano/pico-satellites (less than approximately 100 kg satellites) is of relevance to the Symposium:

1) Earth observation

2) Disaster monitoring

3) Communication type missions

4) Space science and space exploration

5) “Personal use” type missions

6) Other new areas of missions

1) Satellite architectures

2) Novel components and interface technologies

3) Software development styles and architectures

4) Ground test techniques and standardization

5) Ground station systems

6) Archive and information processing

7) Launch opportunities

8) Regulatory issues

9) Education and capacity building

1) Public welfare type service

2) Service for business

3) Experiences of actual satellite projects in other ?elds.