ESTCube-1 Photos
Videos
Made from 4 ESTCube-1 images taken in sequence. Animated by Henri Kuuste.
Stories

The First

The first full image of Tunisia and Mediterranean Sea taken with ESTCube-1 on 15th May 2013 at 13:12:26. This was about a week after launch during commissioning of the spacecraft. Later as we gained more experience the quality of photos also improved.

Hidden Estonia

The first photo with Estonia, which we only realized later. Can you find it? Hint: It's under the clouds and quite small. Also includes Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltics. 2013.08.16 12:32:05

Incomplete Beauty

Download of this beautiful photo was cut short because of a power system reset. At the time we could only store images in volatile memory and there was always risk of losing them due to random resets. This was later improved by a software update. Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname. 2013.10.04 17:01:19

Collages
Mission was to develop the first satellite of Estonia and demonstrate technologies for the electric solar wind sail (E-sail). Read more www.estcube.eu.

  • 1U CubeSat or 1.05 kg nanosatellite.
  • Launched on May 7th 2013.
  • Operational for 2 years and 12 days.
  • All subsystems completely self-developed.
  • Downlinking 1 image took most of a day.
  • Process of image taking: 1) power camera, 2) set filter to discard photos with no Earth, 3) set color balance and shutter speed depending on desert or ice or forest, 4) set timer to take images in the desired location, 5) check small sections of images, 6) download selected full images.
ESTCube-1
CubeSat
Developed largely by Henri Kuuste during a bachelor thesis. Read more "Imaging system for nanosatellite proximity operations".

  • Resolution 640 × 480 pixels.
  • Uncompressed 10-bit images.
  • Each raw image was 384 KB.
  • Storage space only for 4 images.
  • 1 pixel is about 800 meters on ground.
ESTCube-1
Camera