Engineering Methodology for Student-Driven CubeSats (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Methodology for Successful University Graduate CubeSat Programs
2020
The University of Colorado Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering has over a decade of success in designing, building, and operating student led CubeSat missions. The experience and lessons learned from building and operating the CSSWE, MinXSS-1, MinXSS-2, and QB50-Challenger missions have helped grow a knowledge base on the most effective and efficient ways to manage some of the “tall poles” when it comes to student run CubeSat missions. Among these “tall poles” we have seen student turnover, software, and documentation become some of the hardest to knockdown and we present our strategies for doing so. We use the MAXWELL mission (expected to launch in 2021) as a road-map to detail the methodology we have built over the last decade to ensure the greatest chance of mission success. INTRODUCTION CubeSats at the University of Colorado The University of Colorado Smead Aerospace graduate program has launched and operated four successful missions to date: CSSWE [1] [2], MinXSS-1 [3], M...
Educational Aspects of a CubeSat Project
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been involved in two previous CubeSat projects (nCube-1 and -2). The current CubeSat project, NTNU Test Satellite (NUTS), is part of the national student satellite program in Norway, and our project is meant to be a genuine student satellite project. Initially the plan was to base all the work, except project management, on students master's thesis. One of the major experiences from the nCube-projects was that such a complex project hardly could be handled by students only. However, even if the project manager resides in the project for a long time, the work force is ever changing. Due to the nature of the ed-ucation program at NTNU, students usually spend a maximum of 9 months as a project member. In this period, they need to understand the complexity of the project as a whole and their own part in the system as responsible for a subsystem or part of such. Further they need to understand and evaluate previous works, ...
2004 Annual Conference Proceedings
The FalconSAT program is a unique, dynamic small-satellite research program that serves as a capstone course for Astronautical Engineering majors at the United States Air Force Academy. The goal of the program is to give students the opportunity to "learn space by doing space." The program results in a satellite launched into space every two to three years. It is conducted in the same manner required of any civilian company delivering a satellite for a NASA/Air Force launch. In addition to the design and construction of the satellites, students must meet all of the Department of Defense (DoD) milestones, including preparing and briefing the Alternative Systems Review (ASR), Preliminary Design Review (PDR), Critical Design Review (CDR), and Product Acceptance Demonstration (PAD). These reviews are given to and evaluated by members of the civilian aerospace community and scientists and engineers from U.S. Air Force space organizations outside of the Academy. Each student is required to become familiar with the functioning of the payload and all of the subsystems. The average student participates in design, clean-room construction, shake and bake-out testing, ground station operations, program management, and presents review briefings during the two-semester course. The students also prepare and brief the proposed experimental payload briefings to the DoD Space Experiments Review Board (SERB), competing on a level playing field with all of the other civilian and military proposals. This paper discusses the current status of the FalconSAT program, the challenges of an almost complete turnover of personnel every year, and the dynamics of managing the design, construction, and flying of a satellite every two to three years by a completely student team. Since this program is conducted in the same manner as a typical science and engineering program, students from other academic departments also participate in the program. The program has been augmented by the participation of students from six different academic departments. The addition of this multidisciplinary real-world atmosphere adds an extra dimension of realism to the program. This paper discusses the various solutions the Academy has devised to address the many challenges of conducting a successful program in a highly constrained undergraduate environment.
The 75 Student’s Satellite’s Mission - Engineering of CubeSats
medium platform, 2023
“Let us aspire to conduct more spectacular space missions in future years” Prepare to witness history in the making with the 75SSM program — a meticulously crafted initiative of Indian academia that will deploy an impressive fleet of 75 student-built satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). This groundbreaking program pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in space exploration with cutting-edge technology and unprecedented student involvement. The 75SSM expedition is poised to be a remarkable achievement, ushering in a new era of space research and innovation.
OpenOrbiter: A Low-Cost, Educational Prototype CubeSat Mission Architecture
Machines, 2013
The preliminary design for the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) demonstration spacecraft, OpenOrbiter, is presented. OPEN is designed to facilitate the formation of CubeSat development programs nationally and worldwide via providing a publically-available set of spacecraft design documents, implementation and testing plans. These documents should allow the creation of a 1-U CubeSat with a parts budget of approximately $ 5,000. This allows spacecraft development to be incorporated in regular curriculum and supported from teaching (as opposed to research) funds. The OPEN design, implemented by OpenOrbiter, has an innovative internal structure, separates payload and operations processing and includes features to ease and highlight errors in integration.
2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings
Bungo Shiotani is a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida (UF) working on systems engineering aspects for small satellites. Specifically to develop metrics to quantify mission assurance throughout the project life-cycle. Bungo received two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in Aerospace Engineering from UF and the other in Engineering Physics from Jacksonville University. He also received his Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from UF where his thesis, Reliability Analysis of SwampSat, focused on performing reliability analyses on SwampSat, UF's first CubeSat. His experiences and as the project manager with SwampSat lead to an internship at NESTRA (Japan) where he worked on developing system diagrams and test procedures as well as assembly integration and testing of their three microsatellites that were in development. In addition to his Ph.D. work, Bungo is the project coordinator for Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program on multiphase fluid science and technologies at the UF's Chemical Engineering Department funded by the National Science Foundation. As the PIRE project coordinator, he works as a liaison with members from France, Japan, and the United States. Mr. Dante Augustus Buckley, UF's Space Systems Group Dante received his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville in 2006. He is credited for co-founding the Small Satellite Design Club (SSDC) in his undergraduate years after being selected to compete in the Frank J. Redd student competition at the 19th Annual USU/AIAA Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. SSDC is a UF affiliated student organization whose primary goal was to establish a permanent small satellite program on campus while creating awareness of space systems engineering in order to prepare students for their professional careers. Dante is a consultant (former research assistant) for the Space Systems Group (SSG), a graduate research team advised by Professor Norman Fitz-Coy in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. SSG designed and developed a cube satellite mission known as SwampSat, which launched in 2013. SwampSat is a CubeSat for on-orbit demonstration of a compact three-axis attitude control system developed at UF geared to affect rapid retargeting and precision pointing (R2P2) of pico-class (1 kg) and nano-class (<10 kg) spacecraft. Through Dante's leadership, SSDC won the Annual Florida University Nano-SATellite (FUNSAT) design competition sponsored by the Florida Space Grant Consortium and Space Florida in both 2008 and 2009. Dante is also credited for establishing and coordinating outreach efforts. He is the Lead Architect on the Educate Utilizing CubeSat Experience (EdUCE) project, a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) and CubeSat themed K-20 outreach initiative, which in return just may inspire and cultivate the next generation of scientists and engineers to carry this and other work forward. Dante earned a Dean's Certificate in Engineering Entrepreneurship in Spring 2011 through the Engineering Leadership Institute. Dante is the former Curriculum Technologist / Computer Applications instructor at St. Francis Catholic High School (SFCHS) in Gainesville, FL. where he also hosted a TEDxYouth event and coached a FIRST robotics rookie all-star team. Dante is currently a Manufacturing Engineer II at RTI Surgical where he supports the manufacturing process for surgical implants.
The Student Space Systems Fabrication Laboratory: An Approach To Space Systems Engineering Education
2006 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
The Student Space Systems Fabrication Laboratory (S3FL) is a student-led organization dedicated to providing students with practical space systems design and fabrication experience not readily available through the usual academic curriculum. S3FL's approach is to enhance education by coupling classroom knowledge with practicum experience involving real engineering design, analysis, test, fabrication, integration, and operation of actual flight vehicles and space payloads. Each year, S3FL involves over a hundred undergraduate and graduate students in activities ranging from balloon payloads to microgravity experiments to nanosatellites. By participating in the end-to-end development of complete space systems, students acquire knowledge and expertise that would otherwise take years of postgraduate experience to be achieved.
Lessons Learned from AIV in ESA’s Fly Your Satellite! Educational CubeSat Programme
2021
'Fly Your Satellite!' (FYS) is a recurring hands-on programme conducted by the ESA (European Space Agency) Academy Unit of ESA's Education Office. Fly Your Satellite! was established to support university student teams in the development of their own CubeSats by enabling a transfer of knowledge and experience from ESA specialists to students. Selected teams are guided through project reviews and supervised through design consolidation and verification activities, conducted according to ESA professional practice and to standards tailored to fit the scope of university CubeSat projects. This paper focuses on key lessons learned and issues identified during the ongoing verification activities of the CubeSats in the second cycle of FYS (FYS2), and on how that experience is used to the benefit of participants of future cycles, including the teams in the third cycle (FYS3), who are now in the late stages of their Critical Design Review. Special attention is given to the lessons learned during the manufacturing, assembly, integration and testing phases as experience shows that first-time developers tend to underestimate the number of issues which arise when the design is translated from documentation and models into physical hardware. The lessons learned are categorised into the topics of Development, AIV, Project Management, and Product Assurance. In the Development category, the lessons learns suggest attention should be focused on emphasizing the importance of development models and FlatSats for early testing, proactive development of aspects which don't appear to be immediately critical or appear to be on the project's critical path (such as software and test GSE), and anticipating the need for compatibility with a range of possible orbit scenarios. The Assembly, Integration, and Verification category contains a large variety of lessons learned from the preparation for AIV activities, anomalies encountered, and reflection on what was done well in the programme. These lessons cover topics such as dimensional requirement non-conformances, electromagnetic interferences, and recommendations for system level testing preparation. Lessons learned for the Project Management category mostly arise from the understandable lack of (space) project management experience of the student teams, and the discussion focuses on possible mitigation approaches that can be implemented. Specific topics covered include delayed project schedules, management of student resources, risk management, and experiences with legal and regulatory requirements. The lessons learned on Product Assurance stem primarily from the difficulties in applying standard methodologies to educational small spacecraft projects. Problems with configuration control, clean room practices, and anomaly investigation methods are discussed, with recommendations for how student teams could solve such issues, primarily through the creation of additional documentation to track modifications and processes implemented Castillo-Sancho 2 35th Annual Small Satellite Conference INTRODUCTION TO FLY YOUR SATELLITE! 'Fly Your Satellite!' (FYS) is a programme in the ESA Education Office dedicated to one, two, and three-unit CubeSats developed with educational scopes. The programme is open to university teams from ESA Member and Associate Member States 1 .
CubeSat Developmental Programs-Working with the Community
AIAA SPACE 2009 Conference & Exposition, 2009
The last year has seen an explosion of interest in designing, building, and flying CubeSatclass objects in space. Though there are many unanswered questions surrounding the military usefulness of this new class of space hardware, a few key trends are developing in testing the prototypes for the future military systems. An interface standard is emerging that will allow rapid build and integration of many CubeSats at one time into a multiple launcher configuration. Additionally, focal points to bring the community together into an organized team and do the requisite systems engineering to ensure all components can be flown in a compatible CONOP are emerging. If all goes well in integration of these components, the USAF will gain invaluable analytic and test data to establish the utility and price point appropriate for these small entities. This paper describes the trends in the interface standards and discusses the consolidation of efforts across the CubeSat community over the last year.
Thinking Outside the Box: Space Science Beyond the CubeSat
jossonline.com
Over a decade ago, after several years of teaching my Stanford University students different engineering and systems aspects of larger microsat type spacecraft, I developed the first 10-cm cube satellite, which Jordi Puig-Suari at California Polytechnic State University-San ...