The University of Patras (UoP) was founded in the city of Patras in 1964. The university holds two campuses, the main one situated in the city of Patras and the second one in the city of Agrinio. The campus of Patras is located in the suburb of Rio. It is a self-contained campus at the foot of mount Panachaico overlooking the Gulf of Corinth and the mountains of Central Greece. The university maintains consistent cooperation with universities and research institutions worldwide. It also offers an exciting and dynamic educational and research environment that provides students with high level courses. It consists of 24 departments, attracting approximately 33,000 undergraduate students and 4,000 postgraduate ones, employing 1,200 staff members and boasting a very strong research department of 1,600 researchers. In recent years UoP has developed Open Courses and Open Educational Resources available to all citizens.
UPsat
The University of Patras is widely known for the UPsat, which is a 2U Cubesat satellite constructed by Libre Space Foundation, which was initiated by the University of Patras as part of the QB50 mission with ID GR-02. UPSat mission aspires to be the first completely open source satellite ever launched, manufactured in Greece, minimizing the usage of COTS components to the absolute minimum. All subsystems of the satellite are designed from scratch in an open source software and hardware way.
Atlas
One of the greatest achievements of the University of Patras is the creation of the UoP ATLAS Team. The team was founded in October 2006 at the Applied Mechanics Laboratory by undergraduate Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineers, PhD Candidates and EUROAVIA members. It is coordinated by Prof. V. Kostopoulos, Director of Applied Mechanics Laboratory. It has already participated 3 times in Air Cargo Challenge (ACC 2007 Lisboa/Portugal, ACC 2009 Covihla/ Portugal, ACC 2011 Stuttgart/Germany).
The return of investment towards UPsat is expected to be significant, kickstarting fresh knowledge and building an ecosystem around space engineering and new technologies. It all started after the UoP team was invited to attend the QB50 Workshop in Brussels (organized by ESA, NASA and Von Karman Institute), a mission that deployed 50 double CubeSats developed by teams from all around the globe. Finally, after extensive research and hard work, on the 17th of May 2017, the satellite was successfully deployed in orbit by the ISS, and was assigned Norad ID 42716. As of that time the satellite is operational and in orbit.
During these years, UoP ATLAS Team developed 3 different, remote-controlled aircrafts: ATLAS I, ATLAS II & ATLAS III. It is the first Hellenic Team that has ever participated in an European/International Air Cargo Competition.