The BIRDS-4 launch date has been confirmed. It is scheduled to be launched on February 21st, 2021 around 2 AM in JST. In other words, that will be on 20th, 2021 around 7 PM in UTC.
The launcher is the Antares rocket and the Cargo Spacecraft is the Cygnus “NG-15”. The rocket will be launched from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) Pad 0A on Wallops Island, Virginia.
Please check below the website if you would like to access more detailed information.
We started to assemble BIRDS-4 Flight Model (FM) from November.
We were assembling the satellites in the clean-room so that the satellite will not be contaminated by dust.
After we finish, we will do some environment test.
BIRDS-4 CDR was held on 5th September, 2019.
The purpose of CDR which stands for Critical Design Review is to discuss about the detail of BIRDS-4 satellite mission and subsystem. The CDR demonstrates that the maturity of the program’s design is appropriate to support proceeding full-scale fabrication, assembly, integration, and test and that the technical effort is on track to complete the flight and ground system development and mission operations in order to meet overall performance requirements within the identified cost and schedule constraints. Progress against management plans, budget, and schedule, as well as risk assessment was presented.
From Paraguay, Dr. Kurita who belongs to Paraguayan Space Agency and Eng. Federico Gaona who belongs to Polytechnic Faculty of National University of Asuncion participated in CDR.
We did the vibration test using STM: Structural Testing Model.
The purposes of this test are
・Resistance to vibration environment at launch
・Rigidity of actual machine (Lowest mode natural frequency)
・Workmanship on structure and assembly
・Validity of structural analysis model
We are checking characteristics of the model and analyzing to improve.