Design and pre-flight testing of the electrical power system for the ESTCube-1 nanosatellite

Abstract

This work describes the final design and implementation of the electrical power system for ESTCube-1, a 1-unit CubeSat tasked with testing the electrostatic tether concept and associated technologies for the electric solar wind sail in polar low Earth orbit. The mission required an efficient and reliable power system to be designed that could efficiently handle highly variable power requirements and protect the satellite from damage caused by malfunctions in its individual subsystems, while using only commercial-off-the-shelf components. The system was developed from scratch and includes a novel redundant standalone nearly 90% efficient maximum power point tracking system, based on a commercially available integrated circuit, a lithiumion battery based fault-tolerant power storage solution, a highly controllable and monitorable power distribution system, capable of sustaining loads of up to 10 W, and an AVR microcontroller based control solution, heavily utilizing non-volatile ferroelectric random access memories. The electrical power system was finalized in January 2013 and was launched into orbit on 7th of May, 2013. In this paper, we describe the requirements for the subsystem, the design of the subsystem, pre-flight testing, and flight qualification.

Electrical power subsystem design for SamSat nanosatellite

“…Разработанная СЭП, в отличие от коммерческих аналогов, для преобразования энергии солнечных панелей использует преобразователь на интегральных микросхемах, а не на дис-кретных элементах [8,9].…”

ESTCube-1 nanosatellite for electric solar wind sail in-orbit technology demonstration

“…The peak power consumption should be less than 6 W. A 12 V power bus should be provided. To mitigate the risk of mission failure, high levels of redundancy and fault tolerance have been provided in a command and data handling subsystem [17] and an electric power subsystem [18,19]. In this article, we analyse the mission, describe the satellite design, and present the results of system level tests.…”

“…The satellite design provides a detailed system level description and an overall subsystem level description, which includes the purpose, upper level requirements, and technical solutions. Detailed subsystem level descriptions and characterizations are presented in other articles in this issue [12,14,15,17,19].…”

Development of Electrical Power Subsystem of Cube Satellite STEP Cube Lab for Verification of Space-Relevant Technologies

“…For achieving successful mission of STEP Cube Lab, electrical power subsystem (EPS) shall provide functions of generating, conditioning, distributing, and storing the electrical power to stably operate payloads and bus systems during an entire mission duration of satellite [1][2][3][4]. Obland et al [1] performed the power subsystem design for the cube satellite Montana EaRth Orbiting Pico-Explorer (MEROPE).…”

“…In addition, the design was validated by functional tests using a Tae-Yong Park · Bong-Geon Chae · Hyun-Ung Oh prototype of EPS board. Pajusalu et al [3] performed design of the EPS for nanosatellite ESTCube-1. They implemented a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) system, a fault-tolerant battery system, a power distribution system, and an AVR microcontroller-based control solution on their EPS design.…”