SCOTS scientists will launch the country's first satellite into space next year after revealing plans for the three-litre device under construction in Glasgow.
The £500,000 gadget, known as the UKube-1, is being built at the West of Scotland Science park in Maryhill as part of a pilot programme commissioned by the UK Space Agency to test new technologies in space.
It has been under construction at Glasgow-based space engineering firm Clyde Space for the past two years and comprises a stack of three cube-shaped pods, each measuring 10cm by 10cm by 10cm, in line with the CubeSat concept first devised in the United States.
Each cube has a volume of one litre – which can store a surprising amount of information – and is relatively inexpensive to manufacture and launch.
The Clyde Space satellite will be filled with six experimental "payloads" from companies and universities across the UK.
Included will be an experiment for a satnav programme, a system to allow children in school to talk to the satellite and retrieve information for their lessons when it flies overhead, and a programme that experiments with radiation particles in the atmosphere to calculate random numbers.
This software could potentially be used by the military to encrypt information travelling between Earth and space.
UKube-1 is due to launch in 2013 and will orbit just inside the Earth's atmosphere.
Clyde Space's chief executive, Craig Clark, said: "A typical CubeSat mission was a student-built satellite that would maybe go beep or try something out that didn't cost a lot of money. But now it's serving a need, maybe for more communications or images from space.
"If you can think of an application, there's a way of fitting it in a CubeSat. It opens the mind to lots of possibilities."
More than 600 CubeSats have been launched across the world to date, and the Glasgow firm has made components for about 40% of them.
Mr Clark, 38 – who established Clyde Space in 2005 with his wife, Lynn, and now employs 20 engineers – said: "This is the first satellite to be built in Scotland, which makes it special. We have supplied parts for other CubeSats to Nasa, the German space agency and all over the world, but never built a complete one ourselves. It is very exciting."
The satellites are not reserved for big business or universities – anyone with between £100,000 and £300,000 to spare can order their own personalised satellite from Clyde Space's online CubeSat shop and fill it with computer equipment of their own choice.
Mr Clark said: "Before, if people tried to design a satellite, they would have had to start from scratch, thinking about how big to make it and so on. We provide them with a basic shape and they fill it with whatever they want, like a do-it-yourself satellite."
Among those looking forward to next year's launch is the firm's systems engineer, Steve Greenland, who said he has difficulty making people believe what he does for a living. He added: "People ask what my job is and I tell them I build satellites in Maryhill. Sometimes they don't believe it. They laugh at me."
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