BSU Lyceum claims first victory at Major League of CanSat in Russia

The team BelSat of the Lyceum of the Belarusian State University (BSU) has won the first place at the CanSat in Russia competition for the first time. The innovative competition was held in the Russian town of Dubna, BelTA learnt from the press service of the BSU.

The team of the BSU Lyceum consisted of Dmitry Romanovets, Ivan Sayechnikov, Vladislav Pavlovich and Nikita Mishchenko. They successfully launched their nano-satellite BelSat Mark3. This was possible due to the successful performance of the Belarusian team at the preliminary stage of the competition conducted at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in January. “Besides good knowledge of mechanics, radio communication and on-board electronics, students need to be sound in mathematics, computers, the basics of 3D modeling and to demonstrate a true team spirit,” the BSU press service noted.

Before the launch of the satellite, teams had to present their projects to experts and to defend the projects afterwards explaining telemetry and the reasons for possible failures. The satellite of the BSU Lyceum team successfully completed the program and softly landed using the parachuting system developed by the Belarusian team.

The team was trained by research officer of the laboratory of applied space technologies of the Faculty of Radiophysics and Computer Technologies of the BSU Vladimir Cherny and graduate of the BSU Anton Sayechnikov.

The Belarusian team competed with fellow students from Russia. All in all, 22 teams took part in the competition.

The BSU Lyceum team launched its first satellite in May 2012 when they made it to the finals of the CanSat in Russia competition. However, to participate in the Major League, they needed to develop their own spacecraft weighing not more than 1kg and a launch vehicle that would help the satellite to reach the height of 6km. In the near future, an original satellite might be launched from the International Space Station.

CanSat is the design-build-launch competition for space-related topics. The first CanSat competition was held in the United States in 1999. Russia started conducting it in 2012. This competition is also popular in Europe and Japan.