If students where to develop a satellite from scratch it may take them years to complete, and probably they will be already graduated when the satellite is launched to space.
A development and flight kit for the students
The educational kit is based on a very innovative design, the result of many years of experience of the sponsors of Europe to Space, applied to this project.
With this kit the students can focus on what they really want to develop for the mission. This can be just software, for example to test reconfiguration algorithms while in orbit, or it can be the replacement one of the subsystems of the satellite, or just develop a payload that adds new functionalities to the platform.
Participating in a real mission will give the students the opportunity to go through all the phases, acquiring invaluable knowledge about space, even if the field of study is not directly related to Aerospace.
The satellite kit includes the following components:
- One onboard computer (OBC)
- One communications system, including RF and antenna components
- One satellite structure
- A power subsystem to generate, regulate and store energy
- A well defined interface to allow the inclusion of a payload
- The required ground support equipment
- One license of SolidWorks per student
- One license of 3DExperience® per student
Europe to Space - Satellite Kit Preliminary Design
What are some examples of what it can be done?
Because the space industry is a multi-disciplinary field, people for almost all careers can build something useful to fly on the kit. There are endless possibilities, however below are some examples based on the field of study:
- Mechanical: The development of a novel mechanism to deploy a structure that can be used to deploy antennae or solar arrays in the future.
- Software: Apply triple redundancy to information and scrub the memory to fix errors that have occurred because of the radiation.
- Communications: Receive information from airplanes to detect their position (simplified miniature ADS-B).
- Industrial Electronics: Develop a series of sensors and actuators to control the attitude of the spacecraft.
- Robotics & Mechatronics: Develop a mechanism that expands the structure of the satellite to make it bigger or smaller depending on the amount of sun it needs to generate power.
- Bioengineering: Build a payload that contains an experiment that will be monitored to see how it evolves when exposed to radiation and microgravity.
- Artificial Intelligence: Process onboard images to discard unneeded information and optimize the donwlink.
- Power Electronics: Develop a new type of solar cell to add to the existing strings to generate power, and compare the resulting efficiency with commonly used cells.
