Structures and Materials Commons^™

Cubesat Deployable Solar Panel System, Thomas Mcguire, Skye Leake, Michael Parsons, Michael Hirsch, Benjamin Kading, Jeremy Straub, David Whalen

Jeremy Straub

CubeSats are small spacecraft with a nominal size of 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm and a mass of 1.33 kg [1] (though some launch providers are now supporting expanded mass levels). While the CubeSat form factor has re-duced the time and cost of spacecraft development, the required resources are still beyond the grasp of many colleges and universities. The Open Prototype for Educational Nanosats (OPEN) aims to solve this problem. OPEN is an inexpen-sive modular CubeSat that can be produced with a parts budget of less than $5,000 [2]. The OpenOrbiter pro-gram is working to develop this …

Open Beyond Orbit: Using The Designs From The Open Prototype For Educational Nanosats Outside Of Earth Orbit, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

This paper presents an overview of the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) and its prospective use in interplanetary missions. OPEN is framework to facilitate the low-cost creation of CubeSat-class spacecraft via using publically available (provided by the OPEN project) de- signs, software, fabrication instructions and test plans. The base open configuration is designed to be able to be produced with a parts budget of under $5,000. Despite this low cost, it is a very ro- bust spacecraft (with capabilities meeting or exceeding many of the vendor-kit solutions which cost eight-or-more times this amount).

Two approaches for using the OPEN …