Advances for the first central-Am erica satellite: Providing solutions to the challenges of enviromental monitoring in tropical developing countries

Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC) is a public university dedicated to research on multiple science and engineering fields and has participated on IAC-13 and I AC-14 jointly with the Central American Association for Aeronautics and Space (ACAE), to develop the first Costa Rican's CubeSat space mission, aiming to generate new knowledge and to build the right momentum for the promotion of aerospace engineering in the Central American region. Through 2015, TEC has approved resources to start building the first phase of the project, which consists of supporting the scientific mission on the terrestrial surface for the design and construction of adequate technology to measure and track the growth of the tropical forest and weather variables and use them as a mechanism to estimate climate change impacts on the forest and its CO₂ fixation capabilities. While scientific team works on technology adaptation for this purpose, the aerospace and project planning engineering group has continued efforts to design and conduct space mission execution as per internationally accepted standards and procedures. During 2015, the first phase of the space mission lifecycle has made a great progress. Hence, TEC is achieving its main goal by increasing new knowledge, skills and create learning experiences through the process of building a CubeSat as a service for the study climate change and carbon sequestration by forest biomass.