Myriade

Myriade is a European Miniaturized satellite platform developed by EADS Astrium and CNES.

EADS Astrium offers the Myriade bus under the commercial name Astrosat-100.

Description

Myriade satellites are cube-shaped, measuring 60cm along one side, and weigh between 100 and 200 kg.

The control system is a Transputer T805 with 1 Gigabit of memory and capable of 5 MIPS. It is interfaced via i2c to FPGA and PIC microcontrollers that control onboard equipment. Power is provided by one steerable Gallium arsenide solar array.

Communication is by two S band transceivers, offering downlink rates of up to 400 kbit/s, and an optional X band system with downlink rates of 18-72 Mbit/s.

First Myriade satellites

The first Myriade based system was Demeter ( Detection of Electro-Magnetic Emissions Transmitted from Earthquake Regions ), launched in June 2004.

Since then, missions have included :

• PARASOL, a French-built Earth observing research satellite, launched in December 2004
• Essaim, a French military reconnaissance microsatellite constellation, also launched in December 2004
• Spirale, a demonstrator system which includes two 120 kilograms (260 lb) microsatellites, launched in February 2009
• MICROSCOPE
• Picard, dedicated to the simultaneous measurement of the absolute total and spectral solar irradiance, the diameter and solar shape, and to the Sun's interior probing ; launched in June 2010
• ELISA : ELISA 1, ELISA 2, ELISA 3 and ELISA 4 are a suite of French military satellites launched on December 17 2011.

References

• http://www.eoportal.org/directory/pres_MyriadeCNESMicrosatelliteProgram.html
• http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2004ESASP.571E...4T