BRITE-Constellation

BRITE-Constellation is an ongoing space mission carrying out two-band photometry in wide fields with a constellation of six (presently, three operational) BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) nanosatellites. The mission was built by a consortium of three countries, Canada, Austria, and Poland, each operating two BRITE satellites. The six satellites were launched into low-Earth orbits between February 2013 and August 2014. Each satellite is a cube-shaped spacecraft with sides of hosting an optical telescope of aperture feeding an uncooled CCD with a field of view of approximately 20° × 24°. The satellites were intended for photometry of the brightest stars in single passband located in the blue (three satellites) or red (the other three satellites) part of the optical range.

==Early history== The idea of using microsatellite for scientific observations, especially for photometry of bright stars, was born during discussions on possible designs for Canada's first scientific satellite. Discussions led by Kieran Carroll and Slawek Rucinski (University of Toronto) led to three concepts, including a wide-field imager for photometric measurements. A design concept for an astronomical nano-satellite was developed in 2002 by the Institute for Aerospace Studies at the University of Toronto under the Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment Program as Can X-3 in cooperation with a team of Canadian astronomers, headed by Slavek Rucinski, as a first fully three-axis stabilized satellite of 20 cm × 20 cm × 20 cm size. In September 2004, a workshop on nano-satellites for astronomy was organized in Vienna in cooperation with the Austrian Space Agency (ASA, now Aeronautics and Space Agency of the FFG). A proposal from the Institute of Communication Networks and Satellite Communications of the Graz University of Technology, led by Otto Koudelka, for funding of BRITE-Austria (TUGSat-1) was accepted by ASA in 2006 and was built at TUG in cooperation with SFL. In March 2005 a program for improving the infrastructure of Austrian Universities was established by the Austrian Ministry of Science and Technology, to which the University of Vienna submitted a proposal for UniBRITE (PI: Werner W. Weiss), which was accepted in October 2005 and UniBRITE was ordered at SFL. Following an initiative by Slavek Rucinski, Aleksander Schwarzenberg-Czerny (CAMK) was able to obtain funding for two Polish BRITE satellites at the end of 2009. Following that, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) finally funded BRITE-Toronto and BRITE-Montréal (PI: Anthony Moffat, University of Montréal) in 2011. Hence, BRITE-Constellation was born as a collaboration between Austria, Canada and Poland.