Nigeria’s quest to launch itself into space got a major fillip in Japan on Wednesday February 8, 2017 as a researcher from the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) took part in the Joint Global Multi Nation Satellite Project (JGMNB) christened “BIRDS Project”.
The Birds Project is a cross-border interdisciplinary satellite project for non-space faring countries supported by Japan with Nigeria, Ghana, Mongolia and Bangladesh as well as Thailand and Taiwan as participating countries.
FUTA is representing Nigeria in the two year project where postgraduate students designs, assemble, tests and operates five units of identical 1U CubeSats belonging to the four participating countries.
The satellite is to be operated from seven ground stations including FUTA to form for the first time a constellation of 5 CubeSats operated using 7 networked ground stations.
The FUTA representative, Mr. Ibukun Adebolu of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, along with 15 other students are all enrolled as a Master or Doctoral degree students in the space Engineering International Course (SEIC) of Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech), Japan.
JGMNB is a satellite programme for non-space facing countries with the aim of laying the foundation of sustainable space programme by accumulating human resource in Universities and launching a University Space Research and Education Programme.
The project intends to successfully build and operate the first University Satellite of nation, make the first step towards indigenous space programme at each country with minimum budget at Universities in emerging or developing countries.
Reacting to the ground breaking event, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Adebiyi Daramola described it as epochal saying it puts an icing on the cake of his internationalization agenda for the University.
