1. Introduction

The Portuguese Space Agency promotes CubeSat Portugal, an initiative that encourages university level students to design and build their own (small) satellites. It is widely recognized that such competitions foster innovation and motivate students to extend themselves beyond the classroom, while learning to work as a team, solving real world problems under the same pressures they will experience in their future careers.

In this case, dealing with such a complex system as a satellite, which requires a variety of subsystems to operate effectively, allows the students to understand how their knowledge can be applied to develop and operate each subsystem and use them to study and explore Earth or the Universe. The experience and knowledge acquired are easily transferable to other sectors and applications, such as renewable energy systems, robotics, autonomous vehicles control, materials for extreme environments or communication systems.

CubeSat Portugal is fully aligned with the strategic goals of the Portuguese Space Agency, namely the development and evolution of the cultural/educational internationalization frameworks capable of boosting the development of the Space sector in Portugal.

All in all, CubeSat Portugal is a New Space project with the goal of building capacity and fostering connections between students and the industry. The team shall approach this challenge with New Space in mind, aiming to innovate and provide creative engineering solutions on their projects.

This document defines the rules and requirements governing participation in CubeSat Portugal. Revisions of this document will be accomplished by document reissue, marked by the version number. The authority to approve and issue revised versions of this document rests with the Portuguese Space Agency.

The CubeSat Portugal initiative has the support of D-Orbit as an Industry partner.