Abstract
This paper briefly summarizes the trend of small satellite development activities in European community. Recently, the importance of small satellite development activity, especially in terms of education, is getting recognized in Europe and a large amount of organizations and institutions are now taking part of the stream. Though the initiation of the CubeSat projects in Europe was relatively late, there are nowadays not only CubeSat projects but also many middle-sized small satellites under development. In this paper some exemplary small satellite projects in Europe both CubeSats and middle-sized small satellites are described. Based on the experience of author obtained through a 5-years-long research activity at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, exemplary system architecture of modern middle-sized small satellites is described. Along the European small satellite development activities future key technologies are becoming available, which can be also of Japanese interest. For example, space plug and play avionics products marketed in Europe are possible targets to be introduced to Japanese future small satellites. The aspect that most of the European products are ITAR-free makes them very attractive to communities outside Europe including Japan. On the contrary, Japanese small satellites-related products and technologies will be highly welcomed by the European community. In this sense Europe can be one of the strong partners of Japan as well as a possible customer of Japanese small satellite technologies. The author strongly recommends that Japan actively cooperate with European community to achieve rapid technology development and demonstrations.
