Conveners
Small Satellites and CubeSats
- Malgorzata Solyga
Small Satellites and CubeSats
- Nektarios Chari (ESA)
The IRIDE mission, managed by the European Space Agency (ESA) with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and funded through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), is part of a multi-platform Earth observation initiative. The mission aims to deploy a “constellation of constellations” to deliver imaging services across a broad range of applications.
This presentation...
Exploring deep space with CubeSats pushes the boundaries of small satellite engineering into highly
ambitious and technically demanding domains.
While CubeSats have gained strong heritage in low Earth orbit applications, operating in deep space
introduces a new set of thermal challenges. Designing an effective thermal control system (TCS) under
such conditions—within tight constraints...
This paper presents the thermal vacuum chamber (TVaC) testing campaign and thermal model correlation of the 6S CubeSat, the first fully student-developed 1U spacecraft designed, integrated, and tested at Politecnico di Milano by Polispace within the ESA "Fly Your Satellite!" programme. This project represents a significant milestone in the academic training of future space engineers. The 6S...
This mission represents the 6U satellite for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) developed by TRL Space Systems, targeting the role of Czech satellite system integrator. The satellite is equipped with two key payloads, including a hyperspectral camera capable of acquiring high-quality imagery across up to 32 spectral bands and Data Processing Unit (DPU) running onboard image processing algorithms. These...
With launch costs per kilogram to low-Earth orbit at an all-time low and projected to fall even further, new use cases have emerged for the next generation of space systems, such as on-orbit data centers, high delta-V Orbital Transfer Vehicles (OTVs) for last-mile delivery, in-space manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, and space-based solar power. A common denominator for such...
Recently, it was announced that ESA is returning to small-scale missions aimed at the exploring of Mars enabled by the advancement of space technologies. Current CubeSats are able to perform increasingly complex tasks, which in result puts more emphasis on the thermal design and management system. Numerical simulations are able to bring a detailed overview on the thermal environment of...
Spacecrafts face a harsh thermal environment with thermal variabilities induced by a varying sun flux, eclipse, or change in altitude, which emphasizes the importance of spacecraft thermal control verification, and in particular thermal vacuum test. A wide variety of solutions are currently used in agencies and industries around the world. However, when it comes to the selection of a...
