About SMC: Space Mission Center, Hokkaido University

Creation of Space Missions from Bottom up

Space Mission Center (SMC) is an organization to give total support to space missions, from planning of missions and development of mission payloads, to the operation of satellites. In the traditional Japanese space development, it often happened that launch vehicles and satellites had the first priority and then mission payloads were designed to fit within the payload capacity, and finally missions were selected on the basis of the mission payload specification. This is because the long-term plan for the launch vehicles and satellites was determined years ago and missions were adjusted based on the plan. In order to change the current situation of the space development, Space Mission Center supports activities to achieve space missions by making mission the first priority.

An organization like Space Mission Center has never existed in Japanese universities. On the other hand, Hokkaido University is the world's leading university that has many scientists of field sciences such as science, agriculture, and fishery who conduct the research using the observation data from satellites, and many engineers of satellites, spacecrafts, and rockets. Hokkaido University has sufficient human resources, knowledge, and experience to create space missions from bottom up. Although Creative Research Institution of Hokkaido University has Support Office for Space Science and Engineering (SOSSE) to support researches and human resources development of space science and engineering beyond the existing research fields, in cooperation with SOSSE, Space Mission Center aims for creation of space missions utilizing the network of researchers in Hokkaido University.