A team supported by the Portuguese branch of BASRC member Elecnor Deimos have won 1st prize in the ESA Sentinel Small Sat Challenge and the Copernicus Masters Award. Deimos Engenhaira, in collaboration with the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and the Insititute of Space Studies Catalonia (IEEC), were presented with the awards on November 7th, in Tallin, Estonia, during the European Space Week 2017.

In the ESA Sentinel Small Sat Challenge, to which 39 teams applied, the objective was to stimulate ground-breaking satellite technologies leading to new small mission concepts, either complementary or providing added value to the current European large Earth Observation satellites.

The prize, in the amount of one million euros, was given to the idea proposed by two Principal Investigators from UPC/IEEC, Prof. Adriano Camps and Visiting Prof. Alessandro Golkar, together with Deimos Engenharia, a major Portuguese space system engineering company, and GOMSpace, a Danish leading manufacturer of small satellite platforms, and will be used on the production of two-nanosatellites, with important scientific equipment on board.