The Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) is an interdisciplinary unit within the Faculty of Science, established in January 2016 and currently comprising approximately 25 members spread out over the Departments of Physics and Earth Sciences focusing on a broad range of research programs in high energy astrophysics, planetary science (including remote...
HyperSat is a new, modular microsatellite platform for space missions to be realized in a short time and at a low cost. It can support missions of a single satellite or constellation of spacecrafts. Currently, the HyperSat platform is under development. One of its crucial components is Thermal Control Subsystem.
In the space vacuum environment convection does not take place. Hence, the...
ASTRE (students’ space research association of Toulouse) is a student space association run by university students in collaboration with professors and the CSUT (University space center of Toulouse). The main objective of ASTRE is to develop student interest for space science and technology by developing engineering projects. ASTRE also aims at becoming an organization where students from...
Open Source is still a relatively new term for many academics. They often do not know of open source works that are as useful as more widely used proprietary products. Reasons for this include lesser awareness of open source and its advantages, difficulty in migrating from existing proprietary systems, and sometimes, lack of documentation.
The first section of the paper will introduce the...
Abstract
During 2018 a student CubeSat project was developed at George Washington University (GWU) for the first time. The small satellite mission implemented a software stack with the hope of creating a simple and lightweight framework for future academic CubeSats. The developed flight software consisted of a collection of fundamental services and an application layer, which was executed...
A cubesat is a very small, low cost, artificial satellite designed for space research purposes, very popular in the academic community. Cubesats are normally deployed in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which can be defined as orbits up to 1000 km above the earth surface, with an orbital period of approximately 90 minutes at a speed of 7.8km/s. However, a big consequence of this, is that a particular...
Programming great software is one thing - to deploy it is a complete different thing. By deploying, we mean the installation or setup of the software on a different machine from where it was developed. Software deployment is necessary for production shipment but also for testing and collaboration in the same development environment.
All too often, this is a painful and unrewarding process....
The emergence of experimental nanosatellites and especially CubeSats for space exploration and experimentation, gives low-cost access to space technologies to emerging countries, such as Tunisia. In fact, CubeSats can be easily made since their components are widely available. Moreover, CubeSats have versatile applications in different domains, such as: communications, remote sensing for...
Python is not only one of the most important programming languages in the software industry[1][2], but also shows the most solid growth among the widely used ones thanks to its popularity in the Data Science field[3][4]. Python gained lots of traction in the scientific computing field in the 90s and the 2000s thanks to its simplicity and its power as a “glue language”, allowing scientists to...
Built upon the successful expertise of LISA Pathfinder, the 3Cat series cubesats (from UPC NanoSat Lab), Solar Orbiter and Gaia, the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) is designing and implementing a high-performance multipurpose platform for cubesats that can be adapted to different commercial and scientific uses. It provides a robust on-board computer with redundancy to control...
ISTsat-1 is a CubeSat currently under development by students and faculty from Instituto Superior Te ́cnico (IST) along with amateur radio experts from AMRAD. As with any spacecraft, it will need to be monitored, controlled and results from scientific experiments have to be retrieved. How these tasks are communicated between the ground and the spacecraft is the domain of the ISTsat-1 Control...
Additive manufacturing is changing the way of designing structural parts. It offers the following benefits: design for need instead of design for manufacture paradigm, fast prototyping, reduced environmental impact, process optimization, mass reduction and applicability to new materials, among others.
In the space sector mass reduction is a major challenge. Structural components require the...
Open Mission Control Technologies (Open MCT) is NASA open source software, available on GitHub, with an Apache II license. It brings mission control data visualization capability to the desktop, tablet and phones, using web browsers. Open MCT is currently in use on at least three operational CubeSat missions, including the Mars Cube One (MarCO) missions and the Arcsecond Space Telescope...
Model rocketry has inspired many future scientists and engineers due to its safety, low cost, and global popularity. Most often, small model rockets are not equipped with any kind of on-board avionics. A most basic avionics package records the flight parameters, providing data for determining values such as apogee or velocity. To add even the most basic avionics payload to a small model...
During the last decade the amount of Cube-Sats and small satellites from Universities all around the globe increased rapidly. One of these small satellite, the Flying Laptop (FLP), is operated by the Institute of Space Systems (IRS, University of Stuttgart). The operations team uses third party software besides self-written pipelines to propagate the satellite orbit. Without hosting all the...
SPICE is an information system the purpose of which is to provide scientists and engineers the observation geometry needed to plan scientific observations and to analyse the data returned from those observations.
The ESA SPICE Service and NAIF provide a suite of tools that using SPICE data provide ready-to-go functionalities that have proven to be operational for Planetary Missons. Some...
Libre Space Foundation is cooperating with European Space Agency to exploit the advantages of Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology in space applications under the program codenamed “SDR Makerspace”.
The goal of “SDR Makerspace” is to perform research and experiments with SDR software and hardware that will provide insights about the advantages or possible limitations of the technology...
We propose to explore the near Earth micro-meteoroid environment from a CubeSat platform, using a ‚Dust Telescope’ (DT) operated by students as science payload.
The DT, developped by the Aerospace Enginneering Department of the University of Stuttgart is an in-situ dust sensor aiming at retrieving simultaneously the orbital elements and chemical composition of particles in the sub-micrometer...
The number of cubesats and small satellites sent to orbit is rapidly growing. Not only that, but the market trends toward the launch constellations of hundreds of satellites in LEO. This situation will become very challenging in terms of operations and data management for all the New Space companies. In order to overcome these problems, we need to increase the level of autonomy of satellites...
VIGIL is a small radar in lunar orbit to track debris from deep space launches. There have been dozens of rocket stages in lunar-crossing high Earth orbit. There is a possibility that some have been captured in lunar orbit by 3-body effects. With increased travel to the Moon, unexpected objects in lunar orbit pose a risk. Since these objects are not large, and specular flashes may be...
