Happy Birthday PEGASUS!

Birthday celebrations for PEGASUS are now a happy routine! PEGASUS has been in orbit for four years and still operates very well. The picture shows a screenshot of the web-based data center developed by our partner STG-A.

PEGASUS was developed by the FHWN with indispensable help of many people and organizations. I would like to take this birthday is an opportunity to thank all those people. Firstly, this project would not have been possible without the active participation of our dedicated Aerospace Engineering FHWN students. Second, thanks to the FHWN R&D company FOTEC for making this project possible and to the Land NÖ and its department for “Wissenschaft und Forschung” who supported us with financial grants. Furthermore, thanks to the members of the TU Space team who were responsible for many subsystems of PEGASUS, the STG-A group who built the UHF transceiver, several ground stations in Austria and were responsible for the cool web-based Mission Control Center. Thanks also to the support of many industrial partners such as RUAG, Prägler and many more.

Last but not least, thanks go out to the BMK (Ministerium for Klimaschutz, Umwelt, Energie, Mobility, Innovation and Technologie) who helped us navigate the jungle of regulations and laws finally giving us the permission to launch!

I know I omitted many people and organizations but we do remember them, as well as their contributions and are very thankful to them.

Let’s see how long our little friend in space will keep on working. All we know is that next year, the second satellite from the FHWN, named CLIMB, will hopefully join him. Is this the start of a fleet of Austrian satellites? 😊

Stay tuned!  C Scharlemann