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In An Uncertain Environment, Small Sats Are The Future, Charles Crouse

Small Satellite Conference

Cis-Lunar Small Satellites

EXPEDITIONS TO THE MOON AND BEYOND WILL EVENTUALLY BECOME COMMONPLACE AND SET THE STAGE FOR THE EXPLORATION OF AREAS WELL BEYOND EARTH AND ITS' NEIGHBORS.

Mission Utility-Based Smallsat Design Considerations, Anna Lawitzke, Katherine Mulvaney, Emily Macanlis, Gordon Wu, Jacob Griesbach

Small Satellite Conference

SmallSat’s offer low-cost solutions to traditionally high cost, high SWaP mission areas including GEOINT, space domain awareness (SDA), and science missions. While initial engineering may offer intriguing cost vs. performance value, it is important to evaluate space vehicle and payload interactions in order to understand their impact on overall on-orbit mission performance. Many space vehicle and payload desires are in direct conflict and require careful allocation, requirement management and performance evaluation to ensure the SmallSat offering lives up to its mission goals. Lessons learned from large satellite design can be directly applied to SmallSats, while allowing flexibility to meet the …

Lunar Icecube: Development Of Thermal Management System, Boris Yendler, Benjamin K. Malphrus, Nathan Fite

Small Satellite Conference

Design of a thermal control system for Lunar IceCube faced several challenges. Firstly, components have vastly different requirements for operational temperature range and heat dissipation. Secondly, the spacecraft does not have enough external surface to reject waste heat by traditionally designed thermal control system. Thirdly, integration of components into a single thermal control system represents a challenge due to several factors: namely, thermal interference between components due to high packing density; incompatibility of some components which are made by different vendors.

The paper discusses a successful solution of the mentioned above problems. It shows that customization of thermal control systems …

Satellite Reliability Model Supporting End-Of-Life Operations Success, Anton Roig, Christophe Etcheverry, Karine Etienne

Small Satellite Conference

The increasing number of satellites in orbit and the upcoming deployment of constellations of hundreds of small satellites raises the problem of orbital debris and saturation of main LEO and GEO orbits. Currently, about sixty percent of satellites are deorbited at their end of life, including thirty percent deliberately with a propulsion system. The increase in the number of debris has led to the implementation of preventive and corrective actions at an international level to ensure the availability and safety of these orbits for future space projects. It therefore appears necessary to guarantee with the best estimate possible the operations …

Autonomous Monitoring Of A Diverse Ground Station Network, Kyle Colton, Joseph Breu, Bryan Klofas, Chad Norgan, Matthew Waldram

Small Satellite Conference

Planet Labs owns and operates the largest commercial earth-imagery CubeSat constellation. Planet’s ground station network is responsible for the earth-to-space communication link that gathers health and telemetry data, keeps the spacecraft schedule up-to-date, and downlinks the payload data from the spacecraft. The ground station network contains fifteen geographically diverse sites with a combination of leased and owned equipment from multiple vendors. Across those sites, the team monitors over 1600 services on nearly 500 devices. The scale of the network and diversity of equipment present challenges for operations and network health monitoring.

Planet’s Ground Station Operations team monitors assets through a …

The Fully Automated And Self-Contained Operations Paradigm Of The Csim Mission, Sierra Flynn, Karen Bryant, Emily B. Pilinski, James Paul Mason, Michael Chambliss, Lauren De Moudt, Noah Crisler, Matthew D. Hanley

Small Satellite Conference

The Compact Spectral Irradiance Monitor (CSIM) CubeSat Mission has been collecting solar spectral irradiance (SSI) data for over two years, contributing to 40+ years of multi-mission SSI data collection. CSIM utilizes a fully automated and self-contained operations paradigm developed at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). LASP efficiently performs the entire operations workflow for CSIM, from planning through data processing, which nominally requires only 15 minutes of staffed operations support per week. Mission operations students at LASP are responsible for the entire planning process. They query for ground station contacts and solar observation times which are input into …

Janus And Lunar Trailblazer: Lockheed Martin Deep Space Smallsats For Nasa Simplex Missions, Joseph Shoer, Joshua B. Hopkins, Edward B. Bierhaus

Small Satellite Conference

NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program is a principal investigator-led planetary science program focusing on small spacecraft. In the SIMPLEx-2 opportunity, the cost cap for SIMPLEx missions is approximately 1/10th the cost of the next larger class of planetary exploration missions, the Discovery Program. Unlike Discovery missions, SIMPLEx missions launch as rideshare payloads with other NASA primary missions. Lockheed Martin has developed a science-capable deep space small spacecraft architecture to support two missions selected for the SIMPLEx-2 opportunity: Janus and Lunar Trailblazer. Janus is a two-spacecraft mission to fly by two different binary Near Earth Asteroids, partnered …

Ke Ao: A Low-Cost 1u Cubesat For Aerospace Education And Research In Hawaii, Lee Danielle Young, Miguel A. Nunes, A. Zachary Trimble, Christopher Amendola, Aaron Brandt, Hunter Patton, Alexi Perez, Riley Terry, William Tuifua, Douglas Whittingham, Kevin Williams, Amber Imai-Hong

Small Satellite Conference

The Ke Ao satellite is a low-cost 1U CubeSat designed and developed by an undergraduate team of engineering students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) in collaboration with the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL). The primary goal of the mission is to take one or more pictures from space and automatically identify the Hawaiian Islands using Machine Learning Algorithms - this will demonstrate improved onboard operational autonomy in space. A secondary goal of this project is to promote Aerospace Education and Workforce training in Hawaii. The Ke Ao project was inspired by the Hiapo CubeSat initiative of the …

A Tunacan Water-Based Thruster For Cubesats: System Development And Qualification, Marco Pavan, Roman Zakharov, Ivan Timofeev, Gleb Philin, Pavel Savin, Vladimir Fedorov

Small Satellite Conference

Governments and industries developed an increasing interest towards CubeSats and Small Satellites for commercial and scientific missions, however the general absence of propulsion capabilities is limiting the market potential. Electric propulsion systems are generally associated with low thrust and high power requirements, while cold gas thrusters are inefficient because of the low Specific Impulse (lsp). SteamJet Space Systems has developed a very compact, low pressure, water powered electrothermal thruster able to provide a high level of thrust, using less than 20W of power and with a specific impulse in excess of 170 s.

Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Avionics For Small Cots Satellites: To Reality And Prototype, Christian M. Fuchs, Nadia M. Murillo

Small Satellite Conference

In this contribution we present practical experiences from realizing a prototype of the first truly fault-tolerant and autonomously operating avionics suite for miniaturized satellite down to the size of a 2U CubeSat. Our initial demonstrator setup consists of a mix of COTS parts and FPGA development boards, which we gradually expanded in scope and capabilities. After four iterations of PCB development and manufacturing, we have condensed this design to a fully integrated custom PCB-based prototype. Our fourth architecture iteration is stackable and is designed to fit on an 80×80mm PCB footprint. It is furthermore capable of operating as generic satellite …

On-Board Deep Learning For Payload Data Processing: Hardware Performance Comparison, Mattia Varile, Christian Cardenio, Lorenzo Feruglio

Small Satellite Conference

The path towards a multi-planetary species passes through the implementation of disruptive technological innovation. Artificial Intelligence and autonomy on spacecraft will be a fundamental part of this future. Hence, leveraging on-the-edge AI accelerators, such as FPGAs, GPUs, VPUs, ASICs, will constitute an essential component of the spacecraft hardware of tomorrow.

This work presents a comparative work, specifically targeted to the use of on-board satellites.

The tested platforms are Intel Myriad X, Nvidia Jetson Nano, and CPU (x64 architecture)

Tumnanosat, 1u Kibocube Nanosatellite Developed At The Technical University Of Moldova, Viorel Bostan, Nicolae Secrieru, Valentin Ilco, Vladimir Melnic, Alexei Martiniuc, Vladimir Varzaru

Small Satellite Conference

The National Center for Space Technologies (NCST) of Technical University of Moldova (TUM) has been oriented towards a series of nanosatellites, according to the international standard CubeSat. In 2019, NCST participated in the fourth round of the KiboCUBE Program with the nanosatellite "TUMnanoSAT".

KiboCUBE Program is a collaboration between UNOOSA and JAXA that aims to provide to the United Nations Organization members opportunity to launch CubeSat satellites developed for educational and research purposes.

The NCST team was selected by the Japan Aerospace Agency (JAXA) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) for the fourth round of the …

Creating Reliable Software Systems For The Dora Cubesat, Zachary Hoffmann, Judd Bowman, Daniel Jacobs

Small Satellite Conference

The Deployable Optical Receiver Aperture (DORA) CubeSat is a 3U CubeSat that seeks to demonstrate data rates of 1 Gbps over distances of thousands. The DORA technology presents an easy to accommodate optical communications solution for smallsats, which previously was limited by the high pointing accuracy requirement for traditional optical communication systems. We believe this technology to be best suited for surface to orbit communications and the crosslink between small spacecraft, including those in smallsat constellations/swarms.

The Gestalt: A Secure, High Performance, Low Cost Satellite Ground Station Architecture And Its Implementation, Jason Lowdermilk, Simha Sethumadhavan

Small Satellite Conference

In this paper we present The Gestalt, a novel security methodology developed with support from the Office of Naval Research for satellite ground stations systems. While security is often a stated priority for these systems, often it is traded off for better performance, lower cost and reduced design complexity.

We identified two main classes of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers in small-sat systems: 1) intentionally introduced supply chain vulnerabilities in both software and hardware, and 2) inadvertent coding and logic vulnerabilities in code.

Our engineering methodology reduces the risk of attacks through four methods:

1. Debloating: Ground …

Nanosat Mo Framework: Enabling Ai Apps For Earth Observation, César Coelho, Alessandro Marin, Florian Deconinck, Irina Babkina, Jordi Barrera Ars, Massimiliano Pastena

Small Satellite Conference

Following the success of the first Phi-Sat mission, in 2020, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced the opportunity to present CubeSat-based ideas for the Phi-Sat-2 mission as part of its initiative to promote the development of radically innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities onboard Earth Observation (EO) missions. Open Cosmos and CGI submitted a joint proposal for the Phi-Sat-2 mission idea, which takes advantage of the latest research and developments in the European ecosystem. The proposed mission idea is a game-changing EO CubeSat capable of running AI Apps that can be developed, easily deployed on the spacecraft and …

Validating Deployment Dynamics Of The Canisterized Satellite Dispenser (Csd), Stephen K. Tullino, Eric D. Swenson, Jessica L. Marshall Tullino

Small Satellite Conference

Planetary Systems Corporation (PSC) designed the CSD to be a more secure, predictable, and consistent CubeSat deployment system. Though the CSD has proven its safety and reliability on orbit and in other air-and ground-based tests, there was still not enough data needed to develop analytical profiles describing CSD deployment angular and linear velocities and accelerations. The goal of this research effort is to first tune a dynamics model using experimental data collected from three sources: (1) PSC’s microgravity deployment tests onboard a C-9 aircraft in 2014; (2) AFIT led lab bench experiments in 2016; and (3) AFRL-AFIT led tests at …

A Low-Voltage, Ultra-Compact Plasma Spectrometer For Small Spacecraft, Earl E. Scime, Amy M. Keesee, Matthew Dugas, Greg Wagner

Small Satellite Conference

Taking advantage of technological developments in wafer-scale processing over the past two decades, such as deep etching, 3-D chip stacking, and double-sided lithography, we have designed, fabricated, and tested the key elements of an ultracompact (1.7cm-x 1.4cm x 1.4cm) plasma spectrometer that requires only low-voltage power supplies, has no microchannel plates, and has a high aperture area to instrument volume ratio. The energy analyzer and collimator components of the instrument are integrated into a single lithographically fabricated layer to optimize alignment of the collimator and eliminate flux reduction penalties typically associated with collimators. We will present tests of the instrument …

Development And Testing Of A Low Flame Temperature, Peroxide-Alcohol-Based Monopropellant Thruster, Darren King, Curtis Woodruff, Justin Camp, David Carroll

Small Satellite Conference

Recent developments in chemical propulsion for CubeSats have been directed away from high flame temperature propellants such as the ionic salts and towards cooler propellants that mitigate thermal management issues. Engineers at CU Aerospace have continued the development of a Monopropellant Propulsion Unit for CubeSats (MPUC), which burns a diluted mixture of hydrogen peroxide and alcohol called CUA MonoPropellant #10 (CMP-X). The propellant was subjected to UN classification tests and has been certified for air transport, demonstrating “little to no reactivity as an explosive in the UN Test Series 1 & 2 tests.” Recent experimental measurements demonstrate that MPUC with …

The Aepex Cubesat Mission: Quantifying Energetic Particle Precipitation Through Bremsstrahlung X-Ray Imaging, Grant D. Berland, Robert A. Marshall, Conner Martin, Deven Mhadgut, Joseph Buescher, Richard A. Kohnert, Spencer Boyajian, Christopher M. Cully, Michael P. Mccarthy

Small Satellite Conference

Fundamental gaps exist in the understanding and observation of energetic particle precipitation (EPP),a solar-terrestrial coupling mechanism that is vital for climatelogical modeling of the atmosphere and magnetosphere. The Atmospheric Effects of Precipitation through Energetic X-rays (AEPEX) mission is a 6U CubeSat that will measure energetic electron spectra and X-ray images in order to quantify the spatial scales and amount of energy input into the atmosphere, and therefore lost from the magnetosphere, via EPP. AEPEX includes two instruments; AEPEX’s FIRE (Focused Investigations of Relativistic Electron) instrument (AFIRE), a TRL 9 electron detector previously flown on the FIREBIRD mission; and the Atmospheric …

International Collaboration Towards Cambodia’S First Small Satellite Education Program: Lessons Learnt, Maximilien Berthet, Morokot Sakal, Penghuy Srean, Sotheara Oum, Polimey Im, Sokserey Srey, Ryohei Takahashi, Jorge Garcia, Nobuhiro Funabiki, Yoichi Suenaga, Rattana Chhin

Small Satellite Conference

Since 2019, students from the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) and the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) have collaborated to set up Cambodia’s first small satellite education program. Around 30 students from both institutions have organized and taken part in joint educational activities, articulated around the development of a 1U CubeSat, which is planned to become Cambodia’s first satellite. This paper presents lessons learnt so far during the cooperative education program. We first explain how students have led the collaboration between a mentor (UTokyo) and mentee (ITC) institution in different countries, mostly online due to the pandemic. We then provide …

Coordinating Development Of The Swarm-Ex Cubesat Swarm Across Multiple Institutions, Rohil Agarwal, Braden Oh, David Fitzpatrick, Anton Buynovskiy, Shane Lowe, Celvi Lisy, Anargyros Kriezis, Berwin Lan, Zoe Lee, Austen Thomas, Brodie Wallace, Emanuele Costantino, Grant Miner, Jeffrey Thayer, Simone D'Amico, Kristina Lemmer, Whitney Lohmeyer, Scott Palo

Small Satellite Conference

The Space Weather Atmospheric Reconfigurable Multiscale Experiment (SWARM-EX) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored CubeSat mission distributed across six colleges and universities in the United States. The project has three primary goals: (1) contributing to aeronomy and space weather knowledge, (2) demonstrating novel engineering technology, and (3) advancing higher education. The scientific focus of SWARM-EX is to study the spatial and temporal variability of ion-neutral interactions in the equatorial Ionosphere-Thermosphere (I-T) region. Since the mission consists of three spacecraft operating in a swarm, SWARM-EX will take in-situ measurements of the neutral and ion composition on timescales of less than …

Oresat: A Student Team-Based Approach To An Inexpensive, Open, And Modular (1-3u) Cubesat Bus, Andrew Greenberg, David Lay, Glenn Lebrasseur, Emma Levy, Ryan Medick, Hayden Reinhold, Risto Rushford, Miles Simpson

Small Satellite Conference

Most educational CubeSat projects have the same dilemma: not enough money to buy capable COTS hardware, and not enough internal experience (even with teams of students) to build reliable, and inexpensive systems in-house. We present a middle road to the “COTS vs DIY” conundrum: the OreSat bus. OreSat is a fully open source 1U – 3U CubeSat system meant to be built, modified, and flown by student teams. It’s specifically designed to be put together by resource-constrained student teams with “gaps” in their interdisciplinary breadth, as most teams have. OreSat has everything you would expect from a CubeSat system: a …

The Cuava-1 Cubesat—A Pathfinder Satellite For Remote Sensing And Earth Observation, Xueliang Bai, Iver H. Cairns, Patrick Oppel, Youngho Eun, Anthony Monger, Christopher H. Betters, Sergio Leon-Saval, Joe Khachan, James Harpur, Xiaofeng Wu, Yijun Huang, Byung Hoon Cho, Chung Hang Chu, Alex Gaoshan Lian, David Byrne, Flynn Bryant, Daniel Roger Hussey, Mitchell William Galletly, Ada Jiexin Song, Andrew G. Dempster, Joon Wayn Cheong, Ediz Cetin, Tong Wu, Oliver Diessel, Jason Held, Andreas Antoniades, Alix Murdoch, James Unicomb, Paris Michaels, Paris Michaels, Paris Michaels

Small Satellite Conference

In this paper we report a 3U CubeSat named CUAVA-1 designed by the ARC Training Centre for CubeSats, UAVs, and Their Applications (CUAVA). CUAVA, funded by the Australian Research Council, aims to train students, develop new instruments and technology to solve crucial problems, and help develop a world-class Australian industry in CubeSats, UAVs, and related products. The CUAVA-1 project is the Centre’s first CubeSat mission, following on from the 2 Australian satellites INSPIRE-2 and UNSW-EC0 CubeSats that launched in 2017. The mission is designed to serve as a precursor for a series of Earth observations missions and to demonstrate new …

An Overview Of The Alabama Burst Energetics Explorer (Abex) Mission, Jared Fuchs, Michael Halvorson, Victor Lopez

Small Satellite Conference

The Alabama Burst Energetics eXplorer (ABEX) project is a 12U scientific and educational mission to investigate Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) through spectral analysis and localization of joint gravitational-wave GRB mergers using wavefront timing analysis. The project is in development by a multi-university collaboration across Alabama with design work conducted by students under faculty advisement. The effort is organized and funded by the Alabama Space Grant Consortium and includes the University of Alabama, University of Alabama in Birmingham, University of South Alabama, Auburn University, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. ABEX will deploy on a super-synchronous orbit and propulsively maneuver to …

Design Simulation And Testing Of A Custom Coprocessor For Cubesatellites In Leo, Justin Heimerl, Allen Spain, Alexandria Lin, David Cotton

Small Satellite Conference

An arms race in the last decade between computing performance and power-reduction has led to accelerated progress in both hardware and software, provisioning fast, efficient algorithms and small, capable, low-power hardware devices. Meanwhile, small satellites have become increasingly important in defense and commercial missions, due to their low resource consumption in terms of power, space, and cost. Improvements in computer vision algorithms and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) edge computing introduce a means of addressing challenges posed for spacecraft in the realm of autonomy and perception. The University of Georgia’s Small Satellite Research Laboratory has been working to address these obstacles in …

Stp-H7-Caspr: A Transition From Mission Concept To Launch, Noah Perryman, Theodore Schwarz, Thomas Cook, Seth Roffe, Antony Gillette, Evan Gretok, Tyler Garrett, Sebastian Sabogal, Alan George, Ricardo Lopez

Small Satellite Conference

The Configurable and Autonomous Sensor Processing Research (CASPR) project is a university-led experiment developed by student and faculty researchers at the NSF Center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) at the University of Pittsburgh for the Space Test Program – Houston 7 (STP-H7) mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Autonomous sensor processing, the mission theme of the CASPR experiment, is enabled by combining novel sensor technologies with innovative computing techniques on resilient and high-performance flight hardware in a small satellite (SmallSat) form-factor. CASPR includes the iSIM-90, an innovative, high-resolution optical payload for Earth-observation missions developed by SATLANTIS MICROSATS …

United States Military Academy (Usma) Space Engineering And Applied Research (Spear): A Cadet's Idea Becomes Reality, Chalie L. Galliand

Small Satellite Conference

Last year, the United States Military Academy (USMA) graduated its first cohort of fully qualified Space Professionals. The Class of 2020 included the first graduates of USMA’s Space and Missile Defense Program. The program was born out of a capability deficit identified by COL Thomas Pugsley, the founder of the Small Satellites Research Group at West Point, over 12 years ago. This was detailed in his paper, Army Space Education: Closing the Gap with Operational Space, presented at the 23rd Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites. This new program has ignited inspiration among the Corps of Cadets. A couple of …

Small Satellite Reliability: A Decade In Review, Raja Pandi Perumal, Holger Voos, Florio Dalla Vedova, Hubert Moser

Small Satellite Conference

Advances in the small satellite combined with the availability of low-cost launches have led to an increasing number of space missions. As space is more accessible than ever before, new and innovative missions arise. A broad understanding of reliability trends on satellites can guide these future missions towards success. As a result, more and more space industries are focusing on reliability in the early stages of the design. The goal of this paper is to investigate the reliability of small satellites launched over the last three decades. Satellites launched between January 1990 - December 2019 and weighing between 40kg - …

Development Of A Multifunctional Lightweight Membrane With A High Specific Power Generation Capacity, Tetsuya Kusumoto, Masanori Matsushita, Yuki Takao, Ahmed Kiyoshi Sugihara, Osamu Mori, Yasutaka Sato, Yasuyuki Miyazaki, Nobukatsu Okuizumi, Shigeo Kawasaki, Akihito Watanabe, Hiroaki Ito, Toshiyuki Hori, Kazuyuki Nakamura, Chihiro Hatakeyama, Takahiro Kuhara, Shuhei Yamada, Masahiro Fujita, Yuichiro Nada, Genki Ohira, Maiko Yamakawa, Kaoru Namiki, Yudai Kimishima, Kotaro Ikeda, Keiseuke Sugiura, Hideyuki Takahashi, Ayaka Fujita, Yuichiro Tsukamoto, Shinji Takeda, Hiraku Sakamoto, Atsushi Shirane, Kenichi Okada

Small Satellite Conference

As a lighter power generation system, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Sakase Adtech Corp. are developing a demonstrator component named “Harvesting Energy with Lightweight Integrated Origami Structure” (HELIOS), which is a deployable lightweight membrane structure. HELIOS has solar arrays on its surface and demonstrates the technology which enables higher specific power generation capacity compared to the conventional solar array panels. The membrane also has communication antennas, showing the potency of lightweight membrane’s multifunctionality such as large data transmitting by 5G antennas and high-resolution observation by interferometer antennas. This paper presents the component’s concept and design, and the expected achievements.

Improving Ground Station By Reducing System Noise And Losses, Peter W. Pachowicz, Paul Chominski, Jay Deorukhkar

Small Satellite Conference

This paper presents the GMU SatCom Ground Station design and implementation which is dedicated to increasing the quality of a communication downlink by reducing system noises and losses in the receiver path. The design follows practices of the Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication community. This effort was focused on the design of the LFA-type Yagi antennas, lightweight ultra-low noise amplifiers, small BPF filters, and combining polarizations through Software Define Radio (SDR) rather than at the antenna feed. All designs presented were implemented and tested. While the UHF path had a priority in our effort, a design of the VHF path is also …