The first clean room for the assembly of nano-satellites at Taguspark campus was inaugurated on December 5. 

According to Professor Rui Rocha, Co-Director of the IST Nanosat Lab, “this is an essential infrastructure for anyone who wants to work on aerospace projects, especially from a certain degree”.

The clean room, with an ISO-7 rating equivalent to a class of 10,000 particles per m³, keeps the room free of dust through a compressor that puts filtered air into the room, making the pressure inside the room greater than the pressure outside of it. José Carlos Pedro, President of IT (the entity that funded the clean room) highlighted “it is up to each researcher to put forward proposals and then knock on our door to share his/her ideas and explain the reasons why they should be supported. And we support them because, in fact, that’s the great merit of IT”.

Inside the room there was ISTSat-1, the first Portuguese university satellite and the first Portuguese CubeSat. The goal of the IST Nanosat team is to launch the satellite into orbit. However, to do this, any residual dust on ISTSAT-1 must be removed, as this could damage other satellites.

The ISTSat-1, despite appearing to be just a cube with a 10-centimetre edge, works like any other satellite. In particular, it uses a compact, low-power system for receiving ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) signals. These signals are transmitted by aircraft and make it possible to locate them, making it easier to pinpoint the location of an aircraft in the event of an accident.