BUILDING LOW COST CUBESAT: GUIDELINES AND DESIGN APPROACH

Educational Cubesat programs are able to provide low cost launch opportunities to developing countries, previously unable to afford access to space. However, designing and building small low cost satellites as simple as 1U Cubesat, and the associated control ground station requires a sophisticated engineering endeavor, especially for organizations with no aerospace engineering programs. This is further exacerbated by the lack of simple guidelines provided in the aerospace literature to guide the execution of a space mission project. Therefore, it is paramount for generalized access to space that simplified methodologies and guidelines be readily available. In this paper, we shall bridge this gap and present a guide to the workflow of the various engineering tasks that need to be accomplished and the interactions between them drawn from our own experience for mission MASAT1, which is mainly characterized by software integration over Cubesat COTS parts. We shall describe the various engineering, management and administrative tasks that need to be undertaken, as well as the design and implementation options that are available to both engineers and project managers, right from the mission definition to the launch and exploitation of Cubesat-based nanosatellites.