Project MUNAL

Project MUNAL is a part of the High School Consortium Satellite Project, done in collaboration between Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), Nepal, and the International Institute of Space Technology for Economic Development (INSTED), Thailand. High School Consortium Satellite Project’s goal is to develop the world’s first high school CubeSat constellation.

Currently, at least one CubeSat each, made by highschool students, from both countries is planned to be included in the constellation.

The CubeSat from Nepal is being developed at Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) located at Kathmandu University High School (KUHS). The CubeSat is named ‘MUNAL’.

MUNAL Project Timeline

Mission Statement

In-house design of development of Nepal’s second CubeSat, as part of the World’s First High School CubeSat Constellation.

Objectives

The objectives of MUNAL are divided into two parts:

Primary Objectives:

In-house design, build, test, and launch of Nepal’s second CubeSat
To demonstrate novel SSoC-based COM/OBC designed in-house
To give continuity to two Missions of NepaliSat-1: Store & Forward (S&F) and Imaging Mission

Secondary Objectives:

To build a vegetation density database of the earth’s surface
To implement image segmentation for landmass identification using Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning) to increase good image downlink efficiency.
To collect and build a database of radiation dose rate and count rate in Low Earth Orbit (LEO)

MISSIONS

To accomplish the above-mentioned objectives MUNAL incorporates the following missions

Camera Mission
Passive Attitude Control and Determination Mission
Satellite System-on-Chip (SSoC) Payload Demonstration Mission
Radiation Measurement Mission
Art Mission

Among the missions listed above, missions I -IV are science missions, while mission V, Art Mission is a cultural mission. The main significance of this mission is the thematic representation of Nepali culture in space.

Prepared by: Janardhan Silwal