RADCUBE is an ESA technology demonstration mission, focused on demonstrating the use of small satellites (CubeSat form factor) and minaturised instrument technologies for space weather monitoring.

Mission Summary

RADCUBE is an ESA technology demonstration mission performed under the auspices of the GSTP programme. The CubeSat development is led by C3S (Hungary), and launch is currently scheduled in August 2021 to a sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit (LEO). 

Imperial College London is providing MAGIC (MAGnetometer from imperial College), a vector magnetometer built around magnetoresistive sensors, which will be used to measure the magnetic field and monitor magnetospheric space weather via the detection of field aligned currents and changes in the magnetic field. MAGIC is part of RadMag, a compact instrument suite led by EK (Hungary) which also consists of energetic particle detectors. MAGIC will be deployed by means of a tape spring motorized boom provided by Astronika (Poland). MAGIC was successfully integrated into the RadMag instrument suite in early 2021.

The current status of RADCUBE is: ready for launch!

It is scheduled to launch on Arianespace Vega VV19 in August 2021.