Development of a 1U CubeSat as Part of a 3x1U Constellation

In the fall of 2016, the NASA Science Mission Directorate, working with the Virginia Space Grant Consortium, initiated the development of three 1U CubeSats by undergraduate students at universities representing the Commonwealth of Virginia. The University of Virginia, Old Dominion University, Virginia Tech, and Hampton University, were chosen to construct CubeSats for flight in May of 2018. The mission has three primary goals: to educate students by providing hands-on experience, to measure orbital decay on a constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, and to evaluate and demonstrate a system for the communication of relative and absolute spacecraft position. In this paper, we will describe the details of the mission itself, the science behind the mission, and the structure of the mission that was established to accomplish its goals. We will also provide a review of the hardware used by the mission, the software that exists so far, information about the thermal modelling of the CubeSats, the radio system, and environmental considerations. We hope that this paper will serve as a summary of the mission for those who are not familiar with it, as well as an internal document for describing what we have achieved by this stage of development

VT ThickSat: A Scalable Chassis in the ThinSat Program

This paper presents a scalable design of a small satellite chassis for the ThinSat Program. This versatile chassis will fly on Virginia Tech’s ThinSat mission in 2020, VT ThickSat. By incrementing the volume of the satellite chassis, students from Virginia Tech introduce a unique capability that combines the ThinSat’s rapid deployment with upscaled payload sizes. The scalable solution reflects an expansion of the original ThinSat 1T chassis up to nearly that of a1U CubeSat. Enabling the accommodation of larger educational and research payloads using the same proven flight hardware as the 1T option, a family of alternative vehicles for institutions previously constrained to the more expensive CubeSat platform can be realized for low-altitude, short-duration missions. The chassis design offers an attractive alternative to educational CubeSat builds, putting the experiment in primary focus rather than using resources on a build-to-suit vehicle design. With rapid development capabilities and reasonable cost, the capability described here introduces an incremental synergy for nanosatellite space applications as well as building the potential to test and prove out further capabilities for the entire SmallSat community

VT ThickSat: A Passive Deployer Mechanism for a Carbon Fiber Tape Spring in the ThinSat Program

The passive deployer mechanism will fly on Virginia Tech’s ThinSat mission, VT ThickSat, scheduled to launch along with the resupply mission to the ISS, NG-15. This mission is a proof-of-concept that could lead to similar deployable structures in future missions, e.g., solar sails and solar panel deployments. The mission-critical objective is to demonstrate a passive deployment mechanism in space. The boom is required to release itself from the coiled state using only its stored elastic energy. Furthermore, the mechanism takes advantage of a scalable chassis, built for the same mission, restricting it to fit within the space of a 5 x 1T ThinSat form factor. This poster showcases the design progression of the deployer

A Prototype Virginia Ground Station Network

This paper provides a detailed technical description of a prototype ground station network, the Virginia Ground Station Network (VGSN), developed for the Virginia Cubesat Constellation (VCC) mission. Virginia Tech (VT), University of Virginia (UVA), and Old Dominion University (ODU) have each constructed ground stations to communicate with their respective VCC spacecraft. Initially, each university was responsible for commanding its own spacecraft via its own ground station. As the mission progressed, it was decided to network the ground stations and operations centers together to provide backup communications capability for the overall mission. The NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) UHF smallsat ground station was also included in this network. Implementing the VGSN led to the establishment of successful communications with UVA’s Libertas spacecraft via the VT Ground Station (VTGS), demonstrating the utility of collaboration and of the VGSN. This paper provides a technical overview of the VGSN, details concerning signal processing requirements for the mission, a discussion concerning the radio regulatory process as applied to the VCC mission, and plans for future upgrades of the network to continue to support Virginia (and partner institution) small satellite missions