Proceedings of the 8th Mission Idea Contest (MIC8)

Editors:
Rainer Sandau
Shinichi Nakasuka
Rei Kawashima
Willem Herman Steyn
Maximillien Berthet

IAA Book Series- Volume 1 Number 9

The International Academy of Astronautics is known as the first international organization which introduced the concept of small satellites in the early eighties in reaction to the numerous, large and expensive satellite programs. Today the IAA is organizing worldwide the most important symposia and conferences on the subject. The IAA cosmic studies dealing with the aspects of small satellite missions are reference documents for the space community. The Academy is proactive at encouraging international cooperation and conducts small satellite programs in countries throughout the world, especially in developing countries and countries emerging in space activities. The IAA helps also making small satellites an integral part of university science and engineering curricula and cooperates with other international organizations having similar goals.

In this context, Volume 1 of the IAA Book Series “Small Satellites – Programs, Missions, Technologies and Applications” also provides the publication platform for the international mission idea contest (MIC) initiated by the Japanese organization UNISEC (University Space Education Consortium). MIC was established in 2010 to provide aerospace engineers, college students, consultants, and anybody interested in space with opportunities to present their creative ideas and gain attention internationally. The primary goal of MICs, now organized by UNISEC-Global, is to open a door to a new facet of space exploration and exploitation.

Number 1 of Volume 1 of this IAA Book Series was based on the first-ever Mission Idea Contest for Nano-satellite Constellations with response coming from 24 countries in 2010. The primary objective of MIC1 was to encourage innovative exploitation of nanosatellites in constellations to provide useful and sustainable capabilities, services, or data. The success of MIC encouraged the organizers to continue conducting Mission Idea Contests for micro/nano-satellite utilization. The best proposals of these six follow-on MICs have also been published in IAA’s book series as follows: MIC2 in Vol 1 No 3, MIC3 in Vol 1 No 5, MIC4 together with the Deorbit Device Competition (DDC) in Vol 1 No 7, and MIC7 in Vol 1 No 8. The papers from MIC5 and MIC6 have been published in IAA’s Conference Proceedings Vol 2 No 10 together with the papers of the 2nd Debris Mitigation Competition (DMC2).

The actual book is a compilation of the MIC8 papers. The focus of MIC8 was on how to maximize the capability und function of nano-satellite constellations/formations using 6U or smaller satellites. The selected papers were presented at the 11th Nano Satellite Symposium and 8th UNISEC-Global Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, October 2022.