The Moscow Aviation Institute (a national research university) hosted a tripartite meeting of Glavkosmos, MAI and representatives of the Liege Space Center (Center Spatial de Liege).

The meeting was under the actively promoted Glavkosmos initiative on collaboration with the leading Russian universities in development of advanced space technologies. To be more precise, the discussion was dedicated to joint design, manufacture and launch of CubeSats.

It is expected that in this collaboration Belgium will develop an optical payload operating in the infrared spectrum. The task of the MAI will be to design, manufacture and test a CubeSat bus.

Glavkosmos will perform overall coordination of the project and will provide a launch of the CubeSat on the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle.

In addition, the parties also talked about potential cooperation opportunities, outlined the way forward on the CubeSat project, and visited the laboratories of the Aerospace Institute and the Research Institute of Applied Mechanics and Electrodynamics of the MAI.