THIMPHU, 30 April, 2021 (TON): The Bhutanese engineers will complete building a prototype of Bhutan’s second satellite by end of this year, Department of Information Technology and Telecom (DITT) officials said.

The joint satellite project was announced in 2019 and a memorandum of understanding was signed between the two governments on the cooperation in peaceful uses of outer space on November 19, 2020.

A team of four engineers DITT, three from DITT and one from College of Science and Technology, attended a two months course in the first phase of a joint satellite project with Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in Bangalore.

The type, design of satellite, and its payload of the satellite were decided by these four.

The team also received technical training from ISRO. The design of the satellite is based on previously launched ISRO Nano-satellite.

The satellite would be much bigger than Bhutan-1, which was a CubeSat with dimension 10*10*10, and much more complicated, said DITT Deputy Executive Engineer Kiran Kumar Pradhan.

Kiran Kumar Pradhan said, “A different handset is required to use the free frequency bands.”

For the second phase of the project, ISRO and DITT teams will work on primary and secondary payloads respectively.

However, the two teams will meet again when their prototypes complete to jointly work on the assembly and integration of the whole satellite. The satellite will be launched in one of the rockets of ISRO.