SpaceDot - AcubeSAT

The Team

More than dots in space

SpaceDot is a non-profit, volunteering and interdisciplinary student team, supported by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). The team was founded in December 2020 and consists of more than 80 students from AUTh and other universities across Greece and Europe.

Our goal is to pave the way for innovative research on space applications. We strive to actively support making space more accessible for the broad scientific and academic community as well as the general public. To achieve this, we are defined by an open-access, open-source philosophy; all experiment results, code, schematics and knowledge gained are available for anyone to use.

We believe and invest in the potential of Greece to constitute an incubator of space research. This is why we pursue the advancement of space engineering in our country through the organisation of educational activities and the expansion of relationships between academia and industry, while aiding in establishing the first space institute in Thessaloniki.

On the journey to accomplish all of the above, we are passionate about our highly collaborative work, active involvement and occasional tsipouro evenings. Because at the end of the day ...if it's not fun, why bother?

The Project

AcubeSAT is a multidisciplinary project by SpaceDot, a team led by ambitious students and researchers primarily from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The space mission is realized with the support of the European Space Agency (ESA) Educational Office. The team is one of the three accepted in the “Fly Your Satellite! 3” ESA programme.

We are part of the Fly Your Satellite! programme, a dedicated programme of the European Space Agency enabling, mainly through training and financial support, the more than 2500 nanosatellites flown into space, only 7 were destined to study a system of biological nature. None of them was realized through a European endeavor.

Our Experiment

The nanosatellite currently designed by AcubeSAT will have an in-house built pressurized vessel containing a microscopic assay and a lab-on-a-chip, able to sustain yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae growth, in order to probe the effects of radiation and microgravity conditions in low Earth orbit.