Open Source CubeSat Workshop 2020

Contribution List

31. An Open Source Implementation of the ECSS PUS Services in Rust

12/12/2020, 14:15

talk

Room #2

We will present an ongoing project of software development for ECSS PUS-C services in the new robust and fast programming language [Rust][1]$[1]$. [Vision Space Technologies][2]$[2]$ started this open-source project called [Prust][3]$[3]$. The standard ECSS-E-70-41C$[4]$ is a packet utilization standard (PUS), defining the packet structure and a set of standard services. Its recent iteration...

15. SatNOGS - State of the Union

12/12/2020, 14:15

talk

Room #1

An overview of the SatNOGS project, a network of satellite ground stations around the world, optimized for modularity, built from readily available and affordable tools and resources.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite launches rate increases with the participation of old and new entities. In this growing environment SatNOGS provides a scalable and modular solution to track, receive telemetry,...

16. DOCKS – An open-source software suite for space mission profiles

12/12/2020, 14:35

talk

Room #1

The growing pace of the NewSpace has resulted in a significant rise in space missions, and consequently, a need for mission profile tools. Though many tools already exist in the market, either they are not capable of doing the complete mission profile or have high costs, which make them unsuitable for many. To overcome this gap, an open-source software suite targeting scientific nanosatellite...

2. r2cloud - how to build distributed ground station network alone

12/12/2020, 14:35

talk

Room #2

In this talk I would like to give an overview of how I built [r2cloud][1] and [r2server][2] - distributed ground station network. I will cover the key design and organizational decisions that worked and didn't.

The key topics are:

• Why open source and what it would mean from organizational point of view.
• Key design and technologies that help running r2cloud alone.
• Why it is...

14. Cronos sounding rocket

12/12/2020, 14:55

talk

Room #2

Cronos is a hybrid-fueled sounding rocket engineered by the student team White Noise in close collaboration with and under the auspices of Libre Space Foundation. It is a project designed and manufactured in an open and participatory manner.
Cronos is designed to lift 4kg of deployable, payload mass, housed right below the airframe’s nose cone. Its paraffin wax and nitrous oxide hybrid...

30. OpenSatCom: Open Source development methodology models for satellite communications

12/12/2020, 14:55

talk

Room #1

[OpenSatCom][1] is a [European Space Agency][2] activity implemented by [Libre Space Foundation][3] in collaboration with Inno3 aiming to assess the relevance of open-source methodology models for the satellite communications sector, where such models can provide benefits and how can the European Space Agency contribute to assist relevant existing or new open-source projects.

A major output...

19. Charting the development of the Open Source Space Ecosystem

12/12/2020, 15:15

talk

Room #2

Having witnessed the impact that an Open Source approach has made in many segments of the software industry, numerous teams around the world are embracing the Open Source philosophy to implement systems throughout all segments of the space industry and adjacent sectors.
Open Source Space systems have the potential to change paradigms about how space missions should be implemented; to...

20. Progress and Developments in Open Source Electric Propulsion at Applied Ion Systems

12/12/2020, 15:15

talk

Room #1

The state-of-the-art in the field of open source space technologies has continued to progress rapidly in recent years. While significant advances have been made, there are several key areas where accessibility remains a challenge. One of these critical areas requiring further focus on in the open space hardware area is that of propulsion, which still remains prohibitively expensive for most...

40. AcubeSAT, a 3U CubeSat to probe gene expression in LEO: technical & programmatic updates

12/12/2020, 15:35

talk

Room #1

AcubeSAT is a 3U CubeSat designed to perform a biological experiment, probing the dynamic regulation of gene expression of eukaryotic cells in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), utilizing advances in Synthetic Biology and MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems). Besides potential experimental readout, our goal is to demonstrate that the payload design can be utilized for a variety of applications,...

18. OLLO - A 3U Open Access astronomical telescope mission

12/12/2020, 15:35

talk

Room #2

Open Little Luminary Observatory - OLLO is a small orbital telescope system concept aimed to provide an open access platform for astronomical observations. OLLO’s mission is to create an open, interactive tool allowing everyone to access and request images of astronomical objects, such as planets, nebulae or star clusters. This concept aims to bring astronomy and science closer to the public....

5. Power Conditioning and Distribution Unit for 1U CubeSat

12/12/2020, 16:10

lightning talk

Room #1

The Power Conditioning and Distribution Unit (PCDU) as an essential part of a Electrical Power System (EPS) of each satellite. It's purpose is to regulate the power coming from solar panels and to manage batteries in order to supply constant power as needed to the satellite electronics.

We have embarked in developing an open source PCDU to be used in 1U (single unit) CubeSats (or larger),...

10. 'New comer' ground station challenge : demodulate data

12/12/2020, 16:14

lightning talk

Room #1

The NewSpace era has seen the rise of various new actors, especially in the field of telecommunications. For example, the SatNOGS network ([SatNOGS website][1]) allows people from around the world to receive data from CubeSat missions with their own ground station, as an open source project.

In this context, the CCERES team (Paris Observatory) is a 'new comer': we operate a ground station...

29. Design, Fabrication, and Measurement of On-Board UHF Turnstile Antennas with Optimized Radiation Patterns

12/12/2020, 16:18

lightning talk

Room #1

In this study, on-board UHF turnstile antenna systems for CubeSat applications are designed in a simulation and optimization environment in order to obtain different radiation requirements. A turnstile antenna is a configuration with four monopoles that are placed circularly with successive $90^\circ$ phase differences between them. The preference of turnstile structures in CubeSat systems is...

7. Code in Space

12/12/2020, 16:22

lightning talk

Room #1

Code in Space is an international opportunity where students from around the world can submit proposals to upload their code to a nanosatellite orbiting the Earth. The code will be executed by the satellite’s onboard computer and will be tested under real space environment conditions. The code executions test results will be transmitted back to Earth via a satellite ground...

22. Manchester CubeSat Research Group

12/12/2020, 16:26

lightning talk

Room #1

University students have little to no experience in real life satellite design. The Manchester CubeSat Research Group helps educate and upskill space enthusiasts’ students from different fields of study. Currently we are designing a bus intended for a mission range of 200 to 400 km, 50° to 90° inclination, circular orbit, 3U CubeSat with sufficient power and link budget to accommodate various...

36. SunrIde a Student Venture to Democratise Access to Space

12/12/2020, 16:30

lightning talk

Room #1

SunrIde is the Sheffield University Nova Rocket Innovative Design Engineering project. Fundamentally we aim to allow students and in future the broader public to experience and access near space environments and gain the skills and trainings necessary to pave the way for a revival of the UK space industry. Established in 2017 SunrIde engineers have been working tirelessly to expand and...

35. How to contribute to open source

12/12/2020, 16:45

tutorial

Room #1

In this tutorial we will give a brief introduction of how most free & open source projects are developed these days, we will summarize the differences between GitLab and GitHub (arguably the two most popular platforms to host source code nowadays) and make a git walk-through to make our first contribution to a (dummy) project.

Attendees will not need to have anything installed, just a...

23. Python Implementation of CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP)

12/12/2020, 16:45

tutorial

Room #2

CFDP is the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol, which is similar to FTP but designed for application in space communication, mainly spacecraft to ground communication and vice-versa. CFDP is a CCSDS standard and has been published many years ago but has not yet been used widely in space. Upcoming missions, like ESA's Euclid and JUICE missions will make heavy use of CFDP.

Also, CFDP plays a...

24. Standardization of CubeSat PC/104 Connector

12/12/2020, 17:15

discussion

Room #2

The so-called PC/104 connector is present at almost any CubeSat board. It derives from the PC/104 standard, which uses a stacked configuration of boards that use this connector to route power and data through dedicated pins. There is, as the name suggests, a total number of 104 pins that can be used.

This connector was likely first used by Pumpkin, one of the earliest CubeSat vendors, but...

34. Goodbye TLEs, hello OMMs!

13/12/2020, 14:10

talk

Room #1

Tired of squinting at punched cards to find out the orbit of your satellite? Fear no more! Two-Line Element sets, most widely known as TLEs, are coming to and end, and a not-so-new format, OMMs, is set to have a huge relevance in the coming future. But what tools do you have at your disposal to deal with this format? And is it really a format, or a family of them? As part of the OpenSatCom...

26. MetaSat: Metadata for SmallSat Missions

13/12/2020, 14:10

talk

Room #2

The variety of SmallSat missions range from from high school science education programs to interplanetary communication support, and the ways people document their missions are as diverse as the missions themselves. To improve information sharing between missions and across systems, librarians at the Center for Astrophysics together with staff from the Libre Space Foundation have worked to...

17. Nanospace, an open source tool to help concurrent engineering teaming in cubesat preliminary design

13/12/2020, 14:30

talk

Room #2

Designing a cubesat requires close interrelation between different fields, with respectively strong level of expertise, all the more so as development progresses.

Nanospace is a tool designed to ease interaction between expert tools and a graph database. It is not a heavy client application, but a web oriented one. The front-end, Nanospace-UI, an Angular GUI, is accessible through a...

32. What the hell was that?

13/12/2020, 14:30

talk

Room #1

Sending a satellite to space is easier than ever before. Cubesats are relatively inexpensive but at the same time they are capable enough to track ships, watch for earthquakes, or even observe exoplanets. "Ease of launch" does not mean "ease of operation", though; the satellites send a wealth of telemetry back to earth, and turning that flood of information into action is difficult. This...

11. An Open-Source on-board computer platfom for CubeSats

13/12/2020, 14:50

talk

Room #2

We will present an ongoing project of hardware development for CubeSat applications. [Vision Space Technologies][1] has been working on this project known as [VST104][2] since mid 2020. Our goal was to design and open-source a small family of hardware boards in the PC104 format. The effort was aimed to onboard computers (OBCs) and their development & testing auxiliaries. At the moment, a...

9. Orbit.M - An Open-Source Software for LEO Orbit Maintenance in Python

13/12/2020, 14:50

talk

Room #1

What is Orbit.M?

Orbit maintenance analysis tends to be rather rigorous with commercial software like STK, or tedious if you have to develop your own simulator in code. Orbit.M offers to the OSCW audience an open-source, graphical, easy-to-use,...

28. A Dual-Redundant CubeSat Flight Computer Based on Raspberry Pi

13/12/2020, 15:10

talk

Room #1

The DualPi Flight Computer is a low-cost CubeSat on-board computer design based around a redundant pair of Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 devices, for fault-tolerant operation in warm-to-hot redundant modes. This OBC design is the outcome of a long-running project developed at the Surrey Space Centre by undergraduate Electronic Engineering students from the University of Surrey. The design...

37. Doppler Based Orbit Determination with Optimization

13/12/2020, 15:10

talk

Room #2

Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is becoming more and more important as the number of satellites is increasing. The body of knowledge for SSA relies on the tracking data to determine the orbit of artificial objects in Earth orbit. Determining orbit is basically obtaining the state vector, that is the position and velocity vectors, or equivalently obtaining the classical orbital elements at a...

25. Library Space Technology Network

13/12/2020, 15:30

talk

Room #1

Since May 2019, librarians at the Center for Astrophysics together with staff from the Libre Space Foundation have been piloting a new initiative called the Library Space Technology Network (LSTN). The aim of LSTN is to broaden access to space technologies through a network of public libraries who have agreed to install SatNOGS-powered ground stations on their roofs, and engage their...

13. QUBIK Twins: The unplanned mission of an unbuilt satellite to be integrated into a deployer that does not exist

13/12/2020, 15:30

talk

Room #2

[Qubik 1 and Qubik 2][2], are 2 PocketQube open-source satellites, designed, developed, integrated and delivered together with a PocketQube deployer ([PICOBUS][3]) to be flown as part of to participate in the [DREAM Payloads Program][4] of the inaugural launch of Firefly Alpha rocket.

The Qubik twins are tasked to perform Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOP) Satellite Identification...

12. Phoenix - An open source orbital cloud infrastructure

13/12/2020, 16:10

lightning talk

Room #1

Phoenix is a project launched last October as part of the Federation initiative.

The Phoenix project aims to design, build and put into orbit the first bricks of an orbital cloud (a shared IT infrastructure in orbit). This cloud will be based on a decentralized and modular architecture.

Any organization on a global scale could contribute to its deployment by incrementally adding...

8. Portable QO-100 Software Defined Ground Station

13/12/2020, 16:14

lightning talk

Room #1

I would like to talk about my ongoing project "Portable QO-100 Software Defined Ground Station" which is being documented in "https://github.com/barisdinc/QO100-Partable"
The main idea is :
- As cheap as possible
- As small as possible
- As open as possible
- PORTABLE

Based on Arduino Nano uSDX as SDR TRX as IF transceiver at 50MHz, it has dual receivers to have lock to beacons...

21. The OpenSource in Space Podcast

13/12/2020, 16:18

lightning talk

Room #1

Open-source projects are great but discovering new projects is not that easy and keeping up-to-date with existing projects on a deeper level takes time and often a founded understanding of the project is necessary since these teams lag dedicated PR departments.
But what if a central hub would exist where the makers themselves could explain their ideas and thoughts and - even more convenient -...

27. Mechanical design for space applications using open source tools

13/12/2020, 16:22

lightning talk

Room #1

During 2019 and the longest year ever recorded, Libre Space Foundation designed, built and delivered for launch 2 picosatellites named Qubik 1 and 2, and a picosatellite deployer named PICOBUS. Is open source CAD/FEA/CAM software mature enough to give answers in real world problems? This is the story behind the mechanical design, FEA analysis and construction of space hardware while chasing...

33. Pico Fluid Dynamic Actuators in CubeSats

13/12/2020, 16:26

lightning talk

Room #1

As CubeSat capabilities continue to expand as the number of missions increase each year, the Attitude Determination and Control or (ADCS) subsystem is a major hurdle for CubeSat developers to undertake. The ADCS subsystem commonly contains actuators that are used to change the attitude of a CubeSat by means of reaction wheels. This proposal aims to present the use of alternate novel pico Fluid...

3. SDNx DebriSat: Detecting Milli Space Debris In the Low Earth Orbit

13/12/2020, 16:30

lightning talk

Room #1

About half a century’s space programs have littered the Earth’s orbit with more than 22,000 man-made objects of a size larger than a softball and hundreds of thousands of tiny fragments. This increasing number of space unused debris are causing serious threats to the present and future outer space activities, in area of both government (military, intelligence, and civil) and...

6. Demo on writing/loading/installing/executing your code on OPS-SAT

13/12/2020, 16:45

tutorial

Room #1

OPS-SAT is a mission that runs a system on module with ARM-9 processors and an FPGA (Cyclone 5) coding environment. The ARM has a Linux Ångström distribution with Python3, Java, C++, and C available. On top of that ESA is providing a framework that experimenters can use to deploy on-board experiments in a App-like way. All this is available for experimenters to use for free until Nov 2021 and...

4. Restful Data Storage and Visualization

13/12/2020, 16:45

tutorial

Room #2

For operation of a satellite mission (and other projects) it is a very common need to store and display large amounts of data. We can group such data in two categories: planning data and timeseries data. Planning data typically consists of records that contain time ranges and ancillary information (such as for booking of groundstation contact times), where as timeseries data is composed of...