The China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF), the Tsinghua Space and Satellite Technology Company (TSSC), and the Veteran Scientists Association (VSA) of the No. 501 Institute of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) jointly held a news conference here on Thursday to announce the collaboration.

The plan originates from TSSC which is building a microsat that may be launched at the end of the year, from the Taiyuan Satellite Launching Center (TSLC) in the northern Shanxi Province. The microsat would complete all on-orbit engineering testings in two weeks.

To help promote youth involvement and understanding of science and technology, particularly in aerospace, the company decides to donate the microsat to the Youth Development Foundation at the end of the test flight.

At the same time the Veteran Scientists Association joins force and volunteers to design a sister microsat to accompany the launch.

The project draws the attention and support from many scientists. Thirteen members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) attended the news event to show their endorsement.

These scientists said that the project would benefit youths in "raising their consciousness in technology and environmental protection, popularizing knowledge of aerospace technology and Internet to them, stimulate their innovation and creativity, and increasing their science and technology level."

The Foundation sponsors a parallel activity, a satellite naming contest which runs this month and next, with the newspaper Chinese Teenagers News. So far many responses from children suggest using a name that would include the words "Olympiad" to commemorate Beijing's recent successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics. Although the final selection wouldn't be made until September, the project partners said at the news conference that "Olympiad" would definitely be part of the name of the microsats.

The "OlympiadSat", as it is temporary referred to, consists of two components: communications and observations.

The communications component is the microcomsat that TSSC designs and builds. You Zheng, General Manager of TSSC, said that the comsat would orbit at an altitude between 600 and 700 km with a period of about 100 minutes.

The microcomsat is equipped with a wide-angle digital camera; a GPS receiver; subsystems of attitude control, power supply, command and control communications, and thermal control; and a computer processor. Its primary functions are store-and-forward communications, and Earth observations and data collection.

TSSC is affiliated with the Tsinghua University here. The company is a leader in microsat design and manufacturing in China. The Tsinghua-1 microsat, a joint project with the Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Surrey, U.K., has been operating in space for a year.

According to CYDF the observation component will be a larger spherical balloon satellite of 3 to 5 meters in diameter. The highly reflective metallic coating of the balloon satellite will reflect sunlight and serve as an optical beacon for ground observers to see in the night sky.

The balloon satellite will also serve as a radio beacon. The satellite will periodically transmit its orbital parameters such as altitude, velocity, latitude and longitude of the subsatellite point, and time signals.

Once deployed, the TSSC-built microsat will lead the optical balloon satellite by some tens of meters in the same orbit.

Children can thus observe the balloon satellite without using optical equipment such as binoculars or telescopes and collect status data of the microsat. These observations will allow young observers to track and calculate satellite orbits.

Secretary General of the Foundation Gu Xiaojin said, "The 'OlympiadSat' will be China's first satellite dedicated to science popularization activities for youths."

Gu said that participation activities would come in two stages. In the pre-launch first stage, in addition to the satellite naming contest, organizing partners would run other contests such as song writing, essay writing and sci-fi painting, and a contest to solicit ideas from high school and university students science experiments that could be launched with the microsats.

In the launch and post-launch second stage, there will be activities to view the launch in realtime, and use the satellites for Earth observations and telecommunications after they reach orbit.

In order to achieve the activity goals, which includes building 300 small ground stations to receive satellite data, CYDF begins an immediate campaign to raise $9 million renminbi (US $1.1 million).

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