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, identify, receive...
SatNOGS has started as a project for automating tracking and communications with satellites though a network of ground stations. Early enough the need for accurate satellite orbital data, lead us, the SatNOGS Community, to develop and utilize processes and tools that help us to improve our observations.
This development get us involved in Space Situational Awareness(SSA) and Space...
The selection of open-source licenses is a foundational decision for CubeSat projects, with significant implications for collaboration, development, and mission viability. A cohesive licensing strategy is essential to manage the distinct requirements of hardware, software, and data. Such a licencing challenging must align with aerospace-specific regulatory frameworks, to ensure compliance and...
The Space as a service provides the capacity to deliver products and an access easier to the orbits. Moreover, the way to produce a satellite out of the box by the size, by the functions expected, the potential data from system design, the programming and the format data evolution. These external conditions provide a digital support to test the operation concepts including the operation...
In response to the growing need for accessible and distributed space technologies, Waag Futurelab has initiated the development of FabSat—a satellite that can be designed and built using the resources available in any Fab Lab worldwide. Leveraging the global infrastructure of the Fab Foundation, which connects labs through shared tools, skills, and digital fabrication environments, the project...
If you can’t open it, you don’t own it. This principle extends beyond hardware, software or data transparency. It strikes at the heart of planetary sovereignty and justice. Infrastructures—satellites, instruments, data platforms, and computational models—are the invisible physical architectures through which the planet is sensed, imagined, governed and shaped. Today, these systems remain...
Light pollution is an often-overlooked environmental challenge with profound effects on ecosystems, astronomy, and human health. While photometers for measuring sky brightness are widely available, most existing solutions are closed, fragmented, or limit access to the data they generate.
This talk introduces an integrated, fully Open Source approach to monitoring light pollution. By...
As the space industry rapidly evolves, the need for accessible, collaborative, and powerful mission analysis tools has never been greater. Ephemerista is an open-source, satellite communications simulator tool funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and developed by the Libre Space Foundation. Ephemerista provides a comprehensive suite of tools for satellite constellation design, orbit...
The global CubeSat ecosystem continues to evolve through open-source collaboration and localized innovation. This presentation explores how digital fabrication, open hardware, and STEM-based community engagement are being leveraged in Ghana to design and prototype educational CubeSat systems. Drawing from our work at Ghana FabLab, we showcase how tools such as 3D printing, CNC milling, and...
The PHASMA mission, developed by the Libre Space Foundation, is a two 3U CubeSat constellation designed for spectrum monitoring and space-based situational awareness. The mission's primary objectives include in-orbit spectrum analysis (UHF, GPS and S-band) to quantify global spectrum utilization, identify interference sources, and detect regulatory violations using on-board DSP and machine...
Given the ever-growing demand to make science in space more approachable – and the value of experimental data in such conditions – the SpaceDot team has been driven by the ambition of sending a low-cost, high-throughput, modular science platform in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), in service of open science. This has led to the conception of AcubeSAT, a 3U CubeSat carrying a novel payload which combines...
The CENSUS pole (CEntre for Nanosatellites in Sciences of the UniverSe) has integrated its ground station (GS) into the SatNOGS Network, enabling more than 10000 satellite observations. To facilitate deployment and maintenance of the station, the SatNOGS client has been containerized using Docker, and an automatic installer has been developed to allow full remote setup of the software stack,...
How can you develop a mission control center to support a mission involving 2 CubeSats? You don't develop it, you use YAMCS open source mission control software! At least that is what Libre Space Foundation did for its PHASMA mission and you should too.
In this talk i am gonna present how the LSF software team used YAMCS to create a working mission control center to send telecommands and...
AcubeSAT is a 3U CubeSat, developed to conduct a biological experiment in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), designed and built by the interdisciplinary volunteering student team SpaceDot, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Aiming to investigate how gene expression in eukaryotic cells is dynamically regulated in space, this satellite is designed to record their growth and provide valuable...
CubeSat developers are usually encouraged to test their satellite software on actual hardware as early as possible. Development boards, engineering models, and hardware-in-the-loop setups are a very common occurrence across engineering labs. However, these devices are often limited by the constraints of physicality: Small numbers, complex logistics and high costs can make testing inefficient,...
RACCOON OS is an open source operating system based for secure space applications based on Linux, which is being developed at the Technical University of Berlin with support from the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) and partners like Quantum Galactics GmbH and the Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA).
The goal of this project is to create a free, easy to use and secure platform...
In the context of satellite's flight-software (FSW), the so-called the Parameter System or Service (PS) is a software (SW) components, very common in FSWs, its reefers to a software service that provides capabilities for managing on-board parameters, including reading current values, setting new values and redefining parameter locations and properties. In concrete, the PS consist of a...
CubeSat missions face critical ground station access bottlenecks that limit mission effectiveness. Traditional centralized ground networks are characterized by high deployment costs, significant downlink latencies exceeding 90 minutes [1], and long periods of idleness, with stations often unused for over 85% of potential satellite pass times [2]. Furthermore, geographic distribution...
Simulating the trajectory at low altitudes is challenging. The complex dynamics include Earth atmospheric drag, Solar Radiation Pressure, and gravitational perturbations from the Sun, the Moon or other planets. Implementing these effects can be tedious for actors designing complex trajectories, reentry strategies, or autonomous decision-making solutions. This highlights the need for a...
The growing need for hands-on space technology education demands affordable,
easily accessible learning kits that let students build and test core satellite subsystems.
Existing CubeSat kits such as HeptaSat, KitSat, and OpenOrbiter are costly, imported,
and lack local support, limiting adoption in Indonesia. This research addresses that gap by
designing and partially implementing a...
This contribution presents the development of an experimental testbed and hardware-in-the-loop simulator for a multi-functional optical ground station (OGS) being established in Portugal. The system is centered around a 43 cm Planewave CDK17 telescope mounted on an L500 Alt-Az platform, enhanced with a Planewave Series 5 focuser and a custom-designed optical breadboard integrated at the...
This work describes the hardware and software design and implementation for a 1U CubeSat satellite on-board computer. The primary goal was to create an embedded system capable of coordinating tasks, collecting data from various sensors, and managing communication with ground station, all within the tight energy and memory constraints of a small and cheap low-power microcontroller in...
CubeSats are increasingly used as low-cost communication relays, but their convergence with drones, trail-side environmental IoT sensors, and ground control stations creates new challenges in security, resilience, and interoperability. Search and Rescue (SAR) missions provide a compelling case where these systems must interoperate under constrained and adversarial conditions. Rapid...
Precipitation measurement is necessary to study the rainfall patterns and predict the rainfall and storms. There are multiple ground based radars that perform this functionality. CSU-CHILL is one such example where ground based radars are used precipitation measurement. Maintenance of these radars are difficult and expensive. The proposal is to now use CubeSAT and develop a doppler Radar as...
