Digital Commons Network^™

Citizen Science As A Long-Term Environmental Baseline: Assessing Impacts Of A Small Dam Removal In Montana, Usa, Bethany Blakey, Natalie Bursztyn

Watershed Sciences Student Research

As dam removals increase in frequency across Europe and North America, most research has focused on the impact of larger dam removals, despite the removal of small dams being much more common. There are hundreds of small dams in Montana, USA, and this research investigates impacts on stream ecology and morphology using citizen science data collected over eight years spanning before and after a 2020 small dam removal in Rattlesnake Creek. We analyzed pebble count grain size distributions and aquatic macroinvertebrate biotic indices from 2017 to 2024 to assess changes in sediment transport and macroinvertebrate population as well as evaluate …

Semi-Autonomous Reconnaissance Satellite: A Laboratory Demonstration Of End-To-End On-Board Mission Autonomy, Eran Shtoyerman, Raphael Cohen, Rafi Cohen, Oshri Fatkiev, Guy Zaidman, Gal Pinchas, Doron Shterman

Small Satellite Conference

Real-time satellite responsiveness to user requests from the field remains largely unavailable in current space systems. Such capabilities are typically restricted to low-altitude airborne platforms, primarily due to limited satellite communication bandwidth, intermittent ground contact, and the reliance on ground-based mission planning. Enabling true responsiveness requires a paradigm shift toward highly autonomous satellites, in which target selection, task execution, and mission planning are performed on board.

For example, a user may request a satellite to perform the following task in real-time: detect a ceiling tanker ship in a specified area, estimate its velocity from video data, and autonomously track the …

A Comparative Analysis Of Sensing Methodologies During Rendezvous & Proximity Operations, Tyler Ritz, Ian Silverberg, Axel Garcia, Giovanni Lavezzi

Small Satellite Conference

The result: Actionable state estimates in seconds not hours

Fusing a small passive imager with a state-of-the-art ranging payload, such as Peregrine Space Corp’s CORVID 12U and 3U variants, collapses the time to a 10 m relative-navigation gate (1σ RSS uncertainty in 3-axes) by two to three orders of magnitude versus angles-only navigation. While ingested measurement types differ across scenarios, the CONOPS remains unchanged. Active ranging replaces hours of parallax inference with direct measurements.

Spot: A Cubesat Mission For High-Resolution Monitorig Of Anthropogenic Sulfur Emissions, Carla Roesch, Colleen Golja, James Custer, Catherine Ember, Jerome Woodwark, Andrew Matheson, Joshua Vande Hey, Sonymol Vk, Steven Heer, Zixuan Gao, Tim Trent

Small Satellite Conference

Resolving individual industrial sources of SO₂ to constrain aerosol forcing — one of the largest remaining uncertainties in Earth's energy budget.

Autongc Flight Opnav Experiment Results On Capstone, Andrew J. Liounis, Sun Hur-Diaz, Behnam Azimi, Nichalas L. Cason, Chris R. Gnam, Grant Hecht, Steven Z. Queen, Michael J. Romeo, Sean R. Semper, Nathan Stacey, Andrew Tennenbaum, Daniel G. Berdugo, Carl J. De Vries, Benjamin Leser, Anne Long, Liam A. Greenlee, Joseph W. Patton, Steven B. Slegel, Isaac R. Witte

Small Satellite Conference

Summary: We successfully demonstrated on-board automated optical navigation (OpNav) in a lunar near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) using images of the Moon, the Earth, and other solar system bodies, advancing the technology readiness level (TRL) of the autonomous guidance navigation and control (autoNGC) OpNav capabilities from 5 to 7.

Toward Public Access To On-Orbit Propulsion Data From Equuleus: Preparing Real Flight Data For Community Use, Hiroyuki Koizumi, Isamu Moriai, Hokuto Sekine, Keita Nishii, Mariko Akiyama, Shintaro Nakajima, Yosuke Kawabata, Yasuho Ataka, Shunichiro Nomura, Ryota Fuse, Ryu Funase

Small Satellite Conference

EQUULEUS is a 6U lunar exploration CubeSat, jointly developed and operated by the University of Tokyo and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It was launched in November 2022 by the Space Launch System (SLS) into a lunar transfer orbit and achieved insertion into a trajectory toward the Earth–Moon Lagrange region through multiple lunar flybys using its onboard water resistojet propulsion system AQUARIUS. The EQUULEUS primary mission is the demonstration of trajectory control technology in the Sun-Earth-Moon region for the first time by a nano-spacecraft.

Tailored Catalysts For Space Propulsion, Florian Harth, Kathy Bynum, Ilaria Longobardo, Hendrik Spod, Ingo Gräf, Alexander Bier, Hans-Jörg Wölk

Small Satellite Conference

Why catalysts matter in space propulsion

Chemical propulsion systems remain indispensable for satellite attitude control, orbit correction and collision avoidance maneuvers due to their reliability and high specific impulse. In monopropellant thrusters, the catalyst initiates the rapid decomposition of the propellant, generating hot reaction gases that produce thrust without external ignition. Catalyst performance and especially catalyst stability therefore directly determine ignition reliability, response time, thermal stability and operational lifetime of the propulsion system.

Heraeus Precious Metals provides heterogeneous catalysts tailored for space propulsion by combining precious metal chemistry, support engineering and scalable manufacturing to meet the demanding requirements of aerospace …

A Novel Deployable Telescope For Small Satellites Using Adaptive Optic Technology, William Hill, Harbinder Rana, Darren Jones, Trevor Wood, Zac Thomas, Thomas Lacy, Duncan Housden, Calum Meredith

Small Satellite Conference

SSTL has been developing a deployable telescope with funding from the UK Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA). The aim of the study was to design a telescope that could achieve higher resolutions in the visible spectrum while utilising a smaller launch volume. To achieve a cost-effective launch the deployable system has been sized such that it would fit within a representative SSTL platform in a SpaceX Falcon 9 small satellite launch volume. A monolithic system with equivalent performance would require a larger launch volume and, therefore, it is expected that a deployable telescope can secure an overall mission price advantage. …

Scaling Up Monolithic Optics Capabilities: 25cm Aperture And Beyond, Cohl Houldin Hatala, Jordan Smilo, Wim De Vries, Brian Bauman, Christian Tolfa, John Cortes, Paul Rosso, Aaron Godfrey, Darrell Carter, Michael Wong, Seth Cornman, Josephine Smith, John Ganino, Ben Bahney

Small Satellite Conference

The 25 cm “V10” Monolithic Optical Payload has been developed through study phase design into a fully qualified system ready for on-orbit demonstration. This extends Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s monolithic telescope technology toward a rapidly fieldable, high performance space imaging system for small and medium spacecraft buses. Centered on the V10 monolithic Cassegrain optic in fused silica, the payload provides highly robust, diffraction limited performance with inherently maintained mirror alignment, eliminating complex on orbit alignment procedures and significantly reducing mechanical risk. The V10 optic is paired with a heritage focus mechanism and a panchromatic commercial off the shelf CMOS detectors, …

Payload Operation Using On-Board Vision Language Model, Meirav Nevo, Oshri Fatkiev, Guy Zaidman, Doron Shterman

Small Satellite Conference

The rapid maturation of multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) has significantly expanded artificial intelligence applications at the edge, including spaceborne systems. In this work, we present one of the first demonstrations of deploying a compact vision-language model directly on a very-high-resolution Earth-observation satellite payload processor, enabling autonomous on-orbit scene understanding and near real-time decision-making. This represents a paradigm shift in satellite operations, moving from ground-centric processing toward intelligent, self-directed spacecraft. 

Conventional Earth-observation missions rely on ground-based image processing and interpretation, introducing latency, downlink bandwidth constraints, and limited operational responsiveness. By embedding a VLM on board the satellite, visual reasoning can be …

Hyti-2: Advancing Hyperspectral Thermal Imaging Into The Era Of Space-Based Edge Processing, Miguel Nunes, Yosef Onodera, Trevor Sorensen, Robert Wright, Paul Lucey, Luke Flynn, Eric Pilger, Scott Ginoza, Mark Wood, Lance Yoseshige, Gabriel Guererro, Lucas Anderson, Charles Swenson, Sachidananda Babu

Small Satellite Conference

The Hyperspectral Thermal Imager 2.0 (HyTI-2) is a next-generation long-wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral imaging payload designed to operate as a continuously sensing, onboard intelligent node on a small satellite platform. Building on the heritage of the original HyTI mission, HyTI-2 delivers advances in spectral and spatial performance, onboard processing capability, and operational duty cycle, enabling sustained operational capability to support low-latency, data-rich Earth observation architectures for future satellite constellations. As the primary payload of the NASA ESTO InVEST-funded Active Cooling for Multispectral Earth Sensors (ACMES) mission, HyTI-2 is scheduled to launch in 2027 to a 550 km sun-synchronous orbit. HyTI-2 …

Optimization Of Orbit-Maintenance Strategies For Small Satellites In Cislunar Space, Timothy Lauinger, Bradley Cotten, Robert E. Zee

Small Satellite Conference

Renewed interest in lunar exploration and the development of a sustained cislunar economy has driven demand for low-cost missions supporting mapping, communications networks, navigation services, and scientific studies. Recent growth in rideshare opportunities to the Moon has made small-satellite architectures a viable and cost-effective approach for these missions. Successful execution of these missions, however, depends critically on fuel-efficient and reliable orbital insertion and maintenance strategies, as cislunar missions impose substantially higher delta V requirements than low-Earth orbit missions due to the inherent instability of low lunar orbits. Perturbations arising primarily from lunar mass concentrations drive secular growth in orbital eccentricity …

Model To Predict Solar Eclipse Impacts On Cygnss Mission Operations, Zach Wiens, Jillian Redfern, Amanda Alexander, Brian Magee, Sam Jones, William Wells, Caden Gobat

Small Satellite Conference

Launched into low-Earth orbit in 2016, the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission is a constellation of eight small satellites that studies hurricanes and soil moisture. The spacecraft orbit in a fixed orientation with the instrument pointed nadir and the main solar array pointed zenith. During high beta angle seasons – periods during which the magnitude of angle between the Sun vector and the orbit plane is large – the solar arrays generate less power, so mission operators roll the spacecraft 10-16° towards the Sun. This maintains the battery state of charge above the safe-mode threshold. After nine years …

A Feasibility-Aware Attitude Trajectory Planner For Small Satellites, Patrick Mckeen, Niclas Scheuer, Kerri Cahoy

Small Satellite Conference

Spacecraft attitude control traditionally requires extensive per-mission engineering—hand-tuned gains, mission-specific mode logic, and conservative operating envelopes—that breaks down when on-orbit conditions deviate from ground assumptions. This is especially costly for small satellites, where limited ground support makes autonomous adaptability essential. We present a feasibility-aware attitude trajectory planner that replaces this hand-engineered stack with continuous planning from a digital twin: less a new feedback law than a different division of labor, in which the mode logic, gain tuning, and desaturation a conventional ADCS builds as separate pieces are instead absorbed into a single optimization.

Built on the ALTRO trajectory optimization algorithm, …

Dante: A Spaceborne Radar Constellation For Debris Detection And Tracking, Leonardo Carrer, Davide Giudici, Bernhard Niedermayer, Christian Federspiel, Wolfgang Ebner, Robert Greinecker

Small Satellite Conference

The growth of space debris in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is increasing collision risk and challenging the sustainability of space operations, while current ground‑based radars remain limited in sensitivity, coverage and update rates especially for small objects. This paper presents DANTE (Detection ANd Tracking of space dEbris), a spaceborne radar constellation concept designed to enhance debris detection, tracking and orbit refinement directly from LEO. DANTE employs multiple low‑cost satellites equipped with X‑band phased‑array radars operating in two modes: a Tracking Mode for trajectory refinement of known objects and a Beam‑Park/Electronic Fence Mode for debris discovery. Performance analyses indicate sub‑meter resolution …

Software Defined Swarms, Nathan Benz, Scott Miller, Jeff Huang, Sonny Hwang, Todd Sarshad, Edmund De La Cruz, Thomas Magesarcher

Small Satellite Conference

The Starling Extended Mission has demonstrated the transformative potential of software-defined architectures in multi-spacecraft swarms. Building on the original Starling mission, which validated autonomous coordination and networking among small satellites, the extended phase focused on adaptability—updating onboard payload software and software-defined radios (SDRs) to enable entirely new experiments without hardware modifications. This capability signals a new approach: spacecraft swarms can evolve post-launch to meet emerging scientific and operational objectives. 

Central to this extension was the deployment of new software enabling two-way ranging and “reverse GPS” source identification using raw radio frequency (RF) signals. Traditionally, ranging and navigation rely on pre-integrated …

Design Mechanism Framework For Autonomous Small Satellite Constellations – A Newspace Outlook, Mohammed Irfan Rashed

Small Satellite Conference

The increasing deployment of small satellite constellations is driving a transition from isolated spacecraft missions toward distributed and coordinated space operations. However, as constellation size and mission complexity grow, traditional ground-centric operational approaches become difficult to scale due to communication limitations, delayed decision-making, and increased operational workload. While autonomy has been widely explored through onboard algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques, there remains limited focus on how autonomy should be integrated into the systems engineering architecture of constellation missions. This paper presents a Design Mechanism Framework (DMF) for autonomous small satellite constellations that embeds autonomy directly into mission architecture, operational logic, …

Shining A Spotlight On Maritime Dark Traffic, Alex Da Silva Curiel, Darren Jones, Rob Knight, Rupert Taylor, Leo Jofeh, Sir Martin Sweeting, Per Atle Våland, Simon Flack, Patrik Mandelin, Håkon Heier

Small Satellite Conference

The ability to support Maritime Domain Awareness from space using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been successfully demonstrated in the past, however practical challenges in achieving the necessary area coverage, temporal coverage and spatial resolution for a practical system has eluded wider adoption. Yet demand for Maritime Surveillance has increased in recent years, to protect important maritime energy and communications infrastructure, fisheries, and maritime reserves, and especially for maintaining national security and territorial integrity. A novel approach to the SAR payload design solves these challenges, and smallsat technologies have also matured to the point where a High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) system …

High-Torque Reaction Wheels For Agile Small Satellites, Thomas Brunsgaard, Matt Carton, Kearney Lackas

Small Satellite Conference

Blue Canyon Technologies has developed a high-torque reaction wheel (RW) product line to meet the growing attitude control demands of next-generation small spacecraft. As small satellites expand into missions requiring rapid retargeting and precise pointing, spacecraft agility is foundational to mission performance. More targets equal more data collection, translating to greater mission insight and revenue generation. 

This paper describes Blue Canyon’s approach to product line architecture that enabled rapid development and deployment of high-torque reaction wheels across multiple size classes. The high-torque variants deliver 0.5 Nm of torque, representing a 2X increase over standard configurations with 60% of the baseline …

Development Of Piezo Fast Steering Mirrors For Fso Inter-Satellite Communication, Frank Claeyssen, Arnaud Gilson, Thomas Maillard, David Ferris, Xavier De Lepine, Oliver Sosnicki, Jocelyn Rebufa, Clément Cote, Francis Bortolaso, Pascal Mexe

Small Satellite Conference

To allow faster communication between satellites, Radio Frequency (RF) links are being replaced by laser optical links, often called Free-Space Optical Communication (FSO). Each satellite embeds several optical communication terminals (OCT), each one needing two Fast Steering Mirrors (FSM) for laser beam fine and fast steering. Thus, for some giant constellations, the total number of FSM can reach up to 100 000 FSM. This New Space market induces not only technical challenges, such as good SWaP, but also industrial challenges, in particular reproducibility, cost-effectiveness and low cost of ownership vs Orbit segment. To address these various FSM needs, CEDRAT TECHNOLOGIES …

Cubesat Led Transmitter For Optical Communication Downlink, David Hinkley, Sam Pedrotty

Small Satellite Conference

The CubeSat radio frequency (RF) spectrum licensing step has always been long and therefore stressful to developers. With more satellites entering orbit, spectral congestion in the available RF frequency bands has become a problem. An optical-only solution eliminates this problem and provides a path for a lower power and higher throughput data link. The risk of a weather outage drives a solution that requires enough geographically diverse optical ground locations that a clear line-of-sight is always available. The Aerospace Corporation, with funding from NASA, has developed a CubeSat light emitting diode (LED) transmitter and an inexpensive commercial portable optical telescope …

Asynchronous One-Way Range (Aowr) – Alone Positioning And The Applications, Junichiro Kawagichi, Shingo Nishimoto

Small Satellite Conference

The paper first reports the recent operational results of the HOKUSHIN satellite. It explains how our extended code correlation method has performed and provides link threshold information, specifically the demonstrated C/N0 figures. The paper next focuses on cis-lunar space applications, beginning with direct AOWR-alone positioning directly from Earth using three or more small-aperture ground stations. The application employs a ‘Self-Positioning’ strategy. This system operates in cis-lunar space with 3-meter-class ground stations and CubeSats larger than 6U in size equipped with 200x300 mm patch-array antennas on. It enables universities and startups to conduct genuine lunar exploration. The team won the Strategic …

Radiation-Resilient Ai For Small Satellites: A Universal Multi-Bit Edac Architecture For Protecting On-Board Neural Network Models In Memory And Storage, Yin Sun, Nauman Wazir, Joseph Chang, Kwen-Siong Chong, Wei Shu, Hocklai They

Small Satellite Conference

The deployment of onboard artificial intelligence (AI) on small satellites enables real-time Earth-observation triage, object detection, and event-driven tasking with reduced dependence on downlink. These capabilities rely on the integrity of neural network parameters (weights and biases) stored across both volatile memory and non-volatile storage (e.g., DRAM/SRAM and SSD/SD/UFS/eMMC). In low-Earth orbit (LEO), radiation-induced upsets can flip bits in commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) memory and storage, corrupting model parameters and degrading inference accuracy. Such degradation can manifest as persistent misclassification or missed detections. Existing mitigation options are often difficult to scale within small-satellite constraints: Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) incurs substantial mass and …

Nasa's Small Spacecraft & Distributed Systems: Development And Demonstration Of Technologies Enabling Swarms And New Spacecraft Platforms With Ai And Edge Computing, Jan Stupl, Rodolphe De Rosee, Samson Phan, Michael Gaunce, Bruce Yost, Craig Burkhard, Edward Tagalicud, Roger Hunter, Christopher Baker, Justin Treptow-Miller, Sasha Weston, Luke Idziak, Julianna Fishman, Dorothy Santos

Small Satellite Conference

NASA’s Small Spacecraft & Distributed Systems (SSDS) within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate (RTMD) expands U.S. capability to execute unique missions through targeted investment, rapid development, and flight demonstration of small spacecraft technologies applicable to exploration, science and the commercial space sector. SSDS strategically invests in technology development and on-orbit demonstrations executed across NASA, other government agencies, industry, and academia. The program’s University SmallSat Technology Partnerships initiative awards academic researchers with the opportunity to collaborate with NASA to mature innovative technology. Capabilities aligned with RTMD’s technology shortfalls and interests - power, processing, propulsion, sensors, communications, autonomous navigation, architectures, and …

Intelligence Where Data Is Born: Vision Transformer-Based On-Orbit Change Detection For Earth Sensing, Matthew Morabito, Faries Tadros, Catherine Ordun, Michael S. Sellers, Daniel Wald

Small Satellite Conference

This paper introduces a model framework for autonomous hyperspectral segmentation that couples a foundation model with a supervised segmentation head to enable compact, high performance on-orbit scene understanding. This approach is designed to deliver end-to-end onboard processing, inference, confidence scoring, and prioritization so the spacecraft performs interpretation at or near image collection time and minimizes downlink usage by transmitting only high-value or high-interest outputs rather than full image streams. A key design element is adaptive intelligence over mission lifetime: low-size, over-the-air partial models updates as small as kb-scale enable post-launch retuning and mission-specific refinement without GB-scale data transfer. By reusing …

Flight Test Of The Autonomous Navigation, Guidance, And Control (Autongc) Software On The Starling Swarm, Robert Pritchett, Nathan Stacey, Sun Hur-Diaz, Michael Romeo, Nickalas Cason, Katherine Fowee Gasaway, Nathan Esantsi, Behnam Azimi, Sean Semper, Hossein Mohammadkhan, Grant Hecht, Joseph Patton, Liam Greenlee, Justin Clavette, Alan Cudmore, Ian Hammer, Ted Hendriks, Terry Stevenson, Nahum Alem

Small Satellite Conference

Performing real-time autonomous guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) functions onboard spacecraft is critical for enabling greater spacecraft autonomy. The autoNGC (autonomous Navigation, Guidance, and Control) software suite is a collection of applications, built on the NASA core Flight System (cFS), that provides these capabilities. This paper presents results from the first flight demonstration of autoNGC, conducted on the NASA Starling mission in 2025. The Starling spacecraft's use of cFS enabled autoNGC to be uplinked and run onboard despite the spacecraft already being in orbit. The flight test had three goals: to demonstrate onboard GPS navigation, onboard state and uncertainty prediction …

Ai For Autonomous Operation Of Small Satellite Missions, Lucy Donnell, Reuben Lynch, Charlotte Crawshaw, Karl Buckley, Robert Field, Steven Kay

Small Satellite Conference

UK space industry partners Craft Prospect Ltd (CPL) and GMV deliver an advanced avionics demonstrator which incorporates cutting-edge machine learning (ML) techniques to enhance on-board autonomy for small satellite space missions. The work is funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), and the delivery partners combine expertise in embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) and space systems engineering to target use cases for on-board autonomy which offer the best gains for a diverse range of mission types including institutional and commercial Earth observation (EO), navigation, scientific, and lunar exploration missions.

Common technical target applications have emerged as underpinning technologies which enable the …

Back From The Dead: Using Stellar Psf Calibration To Recover Operational Value From A Defocused Skysat Telescope, Phillip Linden, Hira Nadeem, Ross Losher, Venkataraman Krishnaswami

Small Satellite Conference

For large-scale Earth observation constellations, such as Planet’s SkySat fleet, a major challenge is mitigating the effects of post-launch optical aberrations, which can render an asset unusable. This paper presents a novel approach to recover operational value from SkySat-C5, which remained excluded from production for 8 years due to significant, uncorrectable focus deficit at launch. Our method leverages stars to calibrate a reliable Point Spread Function (PSF) used in a deconvolution process that restored the camera’s images to a usable level of quality.

Because there is no on-orbit focus mechanism, the only path to restoration is post-processing deconvolution using a …

Design And Implementation Of A Semi Automated Uhf Ground Station For Small Satellite Missions: A Case Study From India, Binoop Joseph, Vinayak Manoj, Thomas Francis, Madhav Vinod, Nikhil Jacob, Salih Majeed, Prajin I. R., Meghana Suresh, Salman Al Fariz K., Sijo George, Anish Chandra B. S., Anamika Kamath, Anjay Sudesh, Anurag Reghu, Aravind M. B., Manu Mohan, Ashfaque K. P., Amal Chandran

Small Satellite Conference

Mission success ultimately depends on reliable telecommand and telemetry links between spacecraft and Earth. For small satellites operating under tight power, size and link margin constraints, a technically robust and regulation compliant ground station is a mission critical enabler rather than an afterthought.

This poster presents a case study of a semi automated UHF ground station designed, built and commissioned by HEX20 in Thiruvananthapuram — one of the earliest privately owned and operated satellite ground stations in India — covering the hardware signal chain, the tracking and decoding software stack, integration and calibration, and the regulatory path to operation.

Validation Of A Modular Adcs Architecture For Small Satellites, Saish Sridharan

Small Satellite Conference

Poster Presented at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference