Interface control procedures for university satellite programmes

Abstract

Now that more and more universities have joined the CubeSat community and have their own satellite in Earth orbit, it is expected that the planned successors will be of higher complexity. These successors within a university satellite programme will often house more technically ad-vanced subsystems as well as more challenging technology demonstrations for external partners. Also, the number of these third-party experiments is expected to increase throughout the programme. In order to have successful projects, these developments ask for a robust and well-defined inter-face control approach. Interface control ensures the proper mutual development of satellite systems and coordination of simultaneously operating design teams. Well-defined and properly implemented interface control procedures prevent engineers from designing non-complying components that are unable to be correctly incorporated into the satellite. Redesigns are thereby less likely. The characteristics of university satellite projects ask for a different approach to systems engi-neering techniques than what is common within industry. This is attributable to a scarcity of resources, most notably manpower and budget. Considering these limitations, above all, inter-face control procedures have to be practically implementable. This paper proposes a set of interface control tools and procedures which are based on common industry practice, but scaled down for university satellite programmes. By elaborating on the proposed tools for interface control one should be able to set up an own set of tools, customized to its own project. Imple-mentation of the interface control tools and procedures is illustrated based on the Delfi-n3Xt satellite development of the Delft University of Technology where the procedures are currently in place.Space EngineeringAerospace Engineerin