The preliminary design for the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) demonstration spacecraft, OpenOrbiter, is presented. OPEN is designed to facilitate the formation of CubeSat development programs nationally and worldwide via providing a publically-available set of spacecraft design documents, implementation and testing plans. These documents should allow the creation of a 1-U CubeSat with a parts budget of approximately $ 5,000. This allows spacecraft development to be incorporated in regular curriculum and supported from teaching (as opposed to research) funds. The OPEN design, implemented by OpenOrbiter, has an innovative internal structure, separates payload and operations processing and includes features to ease and highlight errors in integration
The United States is experiencing a renaissance in interest in space due to the advent of new lowercost small spacecraft. New launch entrants, such as Interorbital Systems, promise to lower launch cost levels. Many developers also benefit from free-to-developer launch services from NASA or the ESA. Unfortunately, existing commercial off the shelf (COTS) CubeSat hardware is priced based on amortization of design costs across low-sales volume. A lack of trained staff in any one of the numerous disciplines required for spacecraft design or other resources required for in-house development restricts entry into the small satellite industry to those who can afford expensive COTS hardware or pay for significant design expenses. With entry-level satellite hardware still priced in the six-figure range, limited market growth is expected even as the average CubeSat launch cost continues to decline. A new archetype could lower barriers to entry for building small satellites. A free, public-domain architecture for building a small satellite could allow low-cost, in-house satellite development. Under this paradigm, the expenses for initiating a small satellite program are limited to component and launch vehicle costs. The proposed framework allows for broad access to small satellite hardware, greatly increasing the size of the small satellite developer community. In the context of the small satellite market, freely offering plans to construct an entry-level satellite will court new non-traditional actors into building space hardware for launch on commercial and government small satellite launchers. The low-cost, high flight rate possible with the next generation of launch systems affords operators the freedom to experiment and innovate in a risktolerant environment. Successfully demonstrating products and services utilizing low-risk, publicdomain plans will stimulate demand for mature and more capable flight systems in the retail marketplace. If technical schools, community colleges, universities, small businesses and even amateurs can enter into the small satellite ecosystem, at an affordable entrance price, a positive spiral of increasing demand and decreasing cost may be created over time. A free, public domain satellite architecture may, thus, open the door to sustained growth and commercial opportunity for the small satellite industry. A. K. Nervold et al.15
A small satellite in a low-Earth orbit (e.g., approximately a 300 to 400 km altitude) has an orbital velocity in the range of 8.5 km/s and completes an orbit approximately every 90 minutes. For a satellite with minimal attitude control, this presents a significant challenge in obtaining multiple images of a target region. Presuming an inclination in the range of 50 to 65 degrees, a limited number of opportunities to image a given target or communicate with a given ground station are available, over the course of a 24-hour period. For imaging needs (where solar illumination is required), the number of opportunities is further reduced. Given these short windows of opportunity for imaging, data transfer, and sending commands, scheduling must be optimized. In addition to the high-level scheduling performed for spacecraft operations, payload-level scheduling is also required. The mission requires that images be post-processed to maximize spatial resolution and minimize data transfer (through removing overlapping regions). The payload unit includes GPS and inertial measurement unit (IMU) hardware to aid in image alignment for the aforementioned. The payload scheduler must, thus, split its energy and computing-cycle budgets between determining an imaging sequence (required to capture the highly-overlapping data required for super-resolution and adjacent areas required for mosaicking), processing the imagery (to perform the super-resolution and mosaicking) and preparing the data for transmission (compressing it, etc.). This paper presents an approach for satellite control, scheduling and operations that allows the cameras, GPS and IMU to be used in conjunction to acquire higher-resolution imagery of a target region.
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