IAI BGUSAT

BGUSAT was a small Israeli research satellite, a 3U CubeSat about 30 by 10 by 10 centimetres in size and roughly 5 kilograms in mass, built jointly by Israel Aerospace Industries and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. It began in 2008 as a student project under the name NEGEVSAT and was put on hold for lack of funding, then restarted in 2013 with a private donation and a design that used the IAI CubeSat bus platform and a new onboard computer, a GR712RC processor designed by Ramon Chips and Cobham Gaisle. Its small infrared and near infrared camera was meant to study atmospheric and weather phenomena, including atmospheric gases and airglow, and the ground station was run by university researchers and students, who gained hands-on experience in building and integrating a nanosatellite. The Israeli Space Agency set aside one million shekels for research and image processing. BGUSAT was launched on 15 February 2017 on the Indian PSLV-C37 rocket, in a record launch that released 104 satellites, and it decayed from orbit on 24 February 2023.