Background
An important agenda of the society is to organise activities that can create awareness and public interest in aerospace in Malaysia. One such activity is a competition that can capture interest and scientifically challenged undergraduate students in aerospace related activity.

Objective
i) To promote interest in aerospace and harnest skills among students from higher education in Malaysia
ii) To increase visibility of Aerospace Society Malaysia in the community.

Implementation
• To produce the conceptual design of a CubeSat with the mission to detect plastic debris in the ocean. In addition to the conceptual design descriptions, each team is expected to also develop and build a functional prototype of the CubeSat that demonstrates its detection and data communication capabilities. Each team has to submit a video presentation detailing the integration of different subsystems to achieve the mission and the preliminary demonstration of the system’s capability. A live challenge will be held to test the effectiveness of each team’s prototype.

• Participants:
1. Students from any institutes of higher learning in Malaysia.
2. Each team consists of 3 to 5 students and 1 academic mentor from the same institution.
3. Entry fee for each team is RM 100.
Total of 18 teams is participating in the competition.

Impact
More than 60 undergraduate students from public and private universities in Malaysia participated in the live challenge of the AEROS CubeSat Competition 2024 from 26th-27th August 2024 at Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor. The competition required all teams to design a CubeSat with the mission to detect and categorised marine debris. All participants have shown strong level of dedication, passion and determination in completing all the milestones. Most of them had no prior knowledge of CubeSat design, but were able to acquire the knowledge, produce the conceptual design, build a prototype and integrate the system in a span of a few months. It was impressive to observe the performance of the CubeSat designed by the participants in achieving the mission of detecting debris in the lake during the live challenge.

The winners of the AEROS CubeSat Competition 2024 are as follows:
Champion: Apex Orbiters, USM
Runner-Up: Ocean Eyes, USM
Best Video: IIUM Celesta, IIUM