WISA Woodsat’s target launch date has been postponed from the end of 2021 to first half of 2022 due to a change requirement in radio equipment.
WISA Woodsat has been designed to cater for multiple missions from material science, space education and awareness to promoting and facilitating radio amateur communication with and via satellites. The radio system of the satellite has been designed for operating on the radio frequency spectrum dedicated for the radio amateurs. This part of the radio spectrum has been commonly used by the specific radio amateur satellites, but also university and non-commercial nanosatellites.
Use of these radio frequencies is coordinated by the International Radio Amateur Union, IARU. Despite the support from the Finnish Amateur Radio League, IARU has declined WISA Woodsat’s application to use radio amateur frequencies for the communication with the satellite. IARU did not support the application because the satellite’s primary mission is not radio amateur activity.
“We are definitely a material science mission but serving radio amateur community and making satellite communication available for schools, science centres and all interested around the globe has been our other important target from the very beginning of the program”, says WISA Woodsat Mission Manager Jari Mäkinen from Arctic Astronautics.
“To our great disappointment, we can't serve the radio amateur community with the LoRa-repeater mission as we had hoped and planned. We will continue to share the pictures and data online, but the technical aspect has been diminished due to this decision”, continues Samuli Nyman, WISA Woodsat Chief Engineer, Arctic Astronautics.
Building and testing a new radio system as well as licensing a new commercial radio frequency will unfortunately delay the launch of the satellite to 2022. WISA Woodsat’s original and ambitious target was to launch the world’s first wooden satellite on the Earth’s orbit by the end of 2021, within the same year the project was announced.
Arctic Astronautics is currently working with Rocket Labs, the carrier of the satellite, to find the earliest possible new slot for the launch.
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