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 have a precision at least 10 times better than achievable using ground-based observations, and it is packaged inside a CanX-class nanosatellite.
The Principal Investigator for the BRITE mission is Emeritus professor Anthony F. J. Moffat Département de physique, Université de Montréal. Prof. Jaymie Matthews (University of British Columbia), Prof. Stefan Mochnacki and Prof. Emeritus Slavek Rucinski (University of Toronto) are also part of the Canadian BRITE team. 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.
The two canadian satellites are copies of the Austrian BRITE satellites UniBRITE (CanX 3A) and TUGsat 1 (BRITE-Austria). One has an instrument sensitive to a blue (BRITE-Montreal) and the other with a camera optimized for a red wavelength range (BRITE-Toronto).
BRITE-CA 2 (BRITE-Montreal) failed to separate from the launch vehicle.
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