Art Satellite INVADER

ARTSAT Project is developing spacecrafts for artistic missions to make the space familiar to everybody, not only to specialists. Our spacecrafts have 3 concepts:

1. Open: It is open satellite to be utilized widely in our society.
2. Physical: It moves our feeling and emotions physically as a work of art.
3. Aesthetic: Its function and visuals are aesthetic and totally designed.

We have developed the world’s first Art Satellite, “ARTSAT1: INVADER(*)”, that is 10cm cubed, and weighs 1.8kg. It is a nano-satellite that meets 1U CubeSat standard, the world-smallest standard of micro satellite that was adopted at USSS Conference at 1999. The world-first CubeSat was successfully launched by the students in Tokyo University who created XI-IV, and in Tokyo Institute of Technology who created CUTE-I in June 30th, 2003. On February 28, 2014 (JST), INVADER was launched as a piggyback payload of the H-IIA F23 launch vehicle, and inserted into a non-sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 378 km and inclination of 65 degrees. INVADER continued its steady operation on orbit, successfully performing an array of artistic missions by commands from the main ground station at Tama Art University. These missions included algorithmic generation and transmission of synthesized voice, music, and poems; capturing and transmitting of image data; and communicating with the ground through a Chatbot program. INVADER was also equipped with “MORIKAWA”, a mission on-board computer (OBC) compatible with open-source hardware platform Arduino, programmed with various functions reflecting today’s maker/hacker culture such as on-orbit satellite operation and reprogramming via web browser. INVADER extended its orbit for an additional two months and reentered the Earth’s atmosphere for disintegration on September 2, 2014 9:47 AM (JST)