Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

A Review Of Online Collaboration Tools Used By The Und Openorbiter Program, Jeremy Straub, Christoffer Korvald

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter program at the University of North Dakota is a student-initiated, student-run effort to design, develop, test, launch and operate a CubeSat-class spacecraft to validate the designs of the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSatellites (a framework that will be made publically-available to allow faster and lower-cost missions at other educational institutions worldwide). OpenOrbiter involves (at various participation levels) over 200 faculty and students spanning five colleges and ten departments. To coordinate this large group of participants who comprise over seventeen teams and work at disjoint hours in a plethora of locations, online project management, software source control and hardware …

An Expert System For Spacecraft Design, Jeremy Straub, Christoffer Korvald, Tyler Hill, Joshua Berk

Jeremy Straub

Designing a spacecraft is a complicated process that can be problem-prone. This is particularly true in the case of a small spacecraft where volume and mass limitations are enforced by form factor requirements. The Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats implements several restrictions beyond those from the CubeSat form factor, including two different board size specifications which impact the configuration of the payload area support structure and the size of available batteries.

OpenEdge aims to avoid the discovery of form factor, OPEN-specific and other configuration issues during final assembly by checking prospective configurations against the applicable requirements and constraints set during …

The Open Prototype For Educational Nanosats: Fixing The Other Side Of The Small Satellite Cost Equation, Josh Berk, Jeremy Straub, David Whalen

Jeremy Straub

Government supported nano-satellite launch programs and emerging commercial small satellite launch services are reducing the cost of access to space for educational and other CubeSat projects. The cost and complexity of designing and building these satellites remains a vexing complication for many would be CubeSat aspirants. The Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN), a proposed nano-satellite development platform, is described in this paper. OPEN endeavors to reduce the costs and risks associated with educational, government and commercial nano-satellite development. OPEN provides free and publicly available plans for building, testing and operating a versatile, low-cost satellite, based on the standardized CubeSat …