Sprite-Sat, Launched on January 23, 2009.

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The picture on the left side above is courtesy of JAXA. It shows the separation ring of the main payload, IBUKI, and Sprite-Sat built by Tohoku University can be seen on the right (sunny) side of the ring. The right hand side picture show an artist impression of Sprite-Sat by Tohoku University. Sprite-Sat is a 50 kg satellite equipped with scientific instruments to detect "Sprites", lightning phenomena in the upper atmosphere that creates ozon.

Ã…AC delivered a payload named "Tohoku-Ã…AC MEMS Unit" or for short TAMU. The purpose of TAMU was to test Ã…AC packaging technology and provide magnetometer and Inertial navigation data from an IMU.

A photograph of the bottom board of the TAMU flight hardware devliered to Tohoku University is shown below. Four globe-top covered flip-chip 8051 processor modules can be seen in the upper half of the picture. These where the major parts that Ã…AC tested on TAMU. In addition, an Actel ProAsic 3 1000 kgate FPGA was tested as well as a 4 Mbit MRAM from Evergreen (f.m. Freescale). The hall magnetometers that was used to measure the Earth magnetic field can be seen on the left side, in the middle of the picture.

So far, approximately 160.000 packets of TAMU data sent from space has been analysed. The results are excellent and show that Ã…AC's packaging technology is ready for space.

Read more about TAMU payload and the results from space by downloading this publication.