April 15 marks the completion of the second “Send Your Name to Space” campaign.
This time, we collected 7787 names and over 3500 images from 117 countries. In Russia, most submissions came from St. Petersburg — thanks in part to our collaboration with the V.P. Glushko Museum of Cosmonautics and Rocket Technology.
Participants’ names and images will travel to low Earth orbit aboard the 239Alferov satellite, while the most unique drawings will be beamed back to Earth via amateur radio at 436.27 MHz. All data will be stored in a dedicated memory sector of an On-Board Computer. The launch is planned for summer 2025 from the Vostochny Cosmodrome.
A special honor goes to Vladimir Borisovich Kraskin, a telemetry engineer, test specialist, and veteran of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, whose name will also be onboard. He took part in the launches of Sputnik-1 and the Vostok spacecraft that took Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.
This year Vladimir Kraskin’s celebrate 95th birthday. In recognition of his lifelong dedication to space exploration, our Small Spacecraft Projects Team personally presented him with a campaign participation certificate. “I have a certificate confirming my role in launching Earth’s first artificial satellite,” he remarked. “Now, my name will fly aboard a CubeSat.”
Campaigns like this help make space exploration more accessible to the public. Geoscan is the first Russian organization to actively engage a broad audience in its space initiatives. In 2021, we collected names for our first campaign — this time, we expanded the opportunity by allowing participants to submit photos or artwork, which people worldwide enthusiastically embraced. We hope they’ll follow the 239Alferov satellite’s mission, stay updated on its scientific work, and enjoy the Earth observation images it captures. Additionally, the best artwork submitted will be beamed back to Earth via the open-access SONIKS satellite ground station network, a project Geoscan actively supports. We sincerely thank every participant and look forward to inspiring even more people to take an interest in space,” says Alexander Khokhlov, Head of Small Spacecraft Projects at Geoscan.
The 239Alferov is a nanosatellite built on Geoscan’s 3U platform. It was developed for the Space-π program under the Innovation Promotion Foundation, commissioned by Presidential Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 239 and the Zhores Alferov Physics and Technology School. The small spacecraft’s payload includes a gamma-ray detector and the VERA ablative pulsed plasma thruster. The satellite’s transmission frequencies have been coordinated with the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU).