Magellan Aerospace, a Winnipeg, Canada-based space company, received a $1.5 million contract for the preliminary design of a generic small satellite platform to meet the future needs of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Work will begin immediately and build upon the technology innovations developed by Magellan for the SCISAT-1 program. The SCISAT-1 bus was launched successfully Aug. 12, 2003.

The new bus, named MAC-200, will feature such standard subsystems and components as command and data handling, company officials said.