Mayak – Experimental Russian satellite is the brightest shooting star in night sky

Image credit: Cosmomayak

New Delhi: Last week on July14, 2017 at 09:36 Moscow time, Russia's State Space Corporation Roscosmos successfully launched a record-breaking satellites – an Earth observation Kanopus-V-IK satellite,the main payload, and 72 smallsats – from the Baikonur Spaceport, delivering them into different orbits

And Mayak was one of 72 satellites sent into space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Developed by Moscow Polytechnic University (MAMU), Mayak (meaning beacon in English) is a standard cubesat roughly the size of a loaf of bread.

Mayak 3U-CubeSat is set to deploy a large tetrahedron-shaped solar reflector that could make the satellite as the third brightest object in the the sky only after the Sun and the Moon.

Created by young scientists, Mayake is the first crowdfunding spacecraft in history of Russia.

Check out the video of below released by the team, detailing the satellite, its mission and why it has been created.

Video credit: Mayak/YouTube

The team managed to raise more than $30,000 on Russian crowdfunding website Boomstarter, in order to launch their own small satellite.

According to the team, the aim of the project is about encouraging the younger generation to explore the sapce, showing them by their own example that there is nothing impossible.

For the coming month, the satellite will be orbiting Earth, about 370 miles (600 km) high, unfurling a giant mylar reflector with a surface area of 170 square feet.

Once unfurled, at night and in clear weather, Mayak can be seen as the brightest shooting star. In fact, the satellite could be visible in bright twilight and even during daytime passes as well, claims the team.

Interestingly, the team has a tracking app named 'CosmoMayak', in which donaors and all clients of RocketBank can use the app to track Mayak's position in real time.