Q-PACE (Cu-PACE, SIMPLEx 2)

Q-PACE [UCF]

The Q-PACE or Cu-PACE (CubeSat Particle Aggregation and Collision Experiment) is a 3U CubeSat mission developed at the University of Central Florida (UCF) to investigate the behaviour of dust particles in low gravity and to perform a long-duration microgravity experiments in orbit to observe novel low-speed collisions in greater numbers than possible in ground-based, parabolic and suborbital flight experiments.

The long durations will enable study of rare events, such as sticking or fragmentation that occur only in one collision in a thousand. The mission will examine impacts between compact millimeter-sized and centimeter-sized particles and aggregates of micron-sized grains. This size combination was selected due to experimental results that suggest combining particles with very different sizes enables a fraction of the larger bodies to grow.

The payload consists of a GoPro video camera and a test cell - one of the reservoir chambers contains glass and iron beads of 1 mm in diameter and the second reservoir contains SiO² aggregates sieved to a size distribution around 100 µm in diameter.

It was selected in 2015 by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) to be launched as part of the ELaNa program. It was launched on the ELaNa-20 mission on a dedicated LauncherOne. After reaching orbit, the satellite failed to respond.