CanX-3 (Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiments),
also known as BRITE (BRIght-star Target Explorer), is a
mission planned to make photometric observations of some of the brightest starts in the
sky in order to examine these stars for variability. The observations will have a
precision at least 10 times better than achievable using ground-based observations, and it
will be packaged inside a CanX-class nanosatellite.
The Principal Investigator for the BRITE mission is Professor Anthony F. J. Moffat
Département de physique, Université de Montréal. The Austrian Co-Principal Investigator
is Professor Werner W. Weiss, University of Vienna.
The design is a 20 cm cube, chosen to accommodate the main telescope. It leverages a
number of technologies qualified on CanX-2 and incorporates SFL's high-performance
attitude control system, using reaction wheels developed in collaboration with Sinclair
Interplanetary.
With the support of ETech a preliminary design for BRITE has been completed. At the
present time, the components to be integrated into the science instrument are being
evaluated at UTIAS/SFL; this stage of the work is supported by the Canadian Space Agency.
.png)
