UoSAT-12 is a British satellite in

Low Earth Orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never mor ...

. It is the twelfth satellite in the University of Surrey series and was designed and built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL). It was launched into orbit in April 1999 on board a Dnepr rocket from Yasny Russia.M. Fouquet and M. Sweeting
UoSAT-12 minisatellite for high performance Earth observation at low cost
proceedings of IAF '96.

Mission

UoSAT-12 was an experimental mission used to demonstrate and test a number of new technologies. Imaging cameras and a high-speed 1 Mbit/s S-band downlink (the MERLION experiment) were tested. An

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP h ...

stack was uploaded to the satellite, allowing experiments in extending the Internet to space to be made by

NASA Goddard The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC empl ...

as part of its Operating Missions as Nodes on the Internet (OMNI) effort.K. Hogie, ''et al.''
Using standard Internet Protocols and applications in space
Computer Networks, special issue on Interplanetary Internet, vol. 47 no. 5, pp. 603-650, April 2005.K. Hogie, ''et al.''
Putting more Internet nodes in space
, CSC World, Computer Sciences Corporation, pp. 21-23, April/June 2006. These now-proven technologies were later adopted by SSTL in the design of its

Disaster Monitoring Constellation The Disaster Monitoring Constellation for International Imaging (DMCii) or just Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) consists of a number of remote sensing satellites constructed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) and operated for the A ...

satellites.

References

University of Surrey Amateur radio satellites Satellites of the United Kingdom Spacecraft launched in 1999 Satellite Internet access Spacecraft launched by Dnepr rockets {{UK-spacecraft-stub