Engineering Methodology for Student-Driven CubeSats

Abstract

CubeSats are widely used by universities and research institutions all over the world. Their popularity is generally attributed to the use of low-cost components, free student labor and simple design. They have been shown to encourage Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) students to become involved in designing, implementing and testing a real functioning spacecraft system. Projects like this encourage students from different disciplines to team up to design and build CubeSats, providing interdisciplinary work experience. Participating students vary in their expertise in developing such systems. Some will work on the project for years while others are not willing to spend two or three consecutive semesters developing a CubeSat project. Despite their simplicity in design and low cost, CubeSats are considered great engineering systems for exploring space. Nevertheless, a large number of CubeSat projects fail due to having an unclear mission, ambiguous system requirements and a lack of documentation. Students need to have a clear vision of how to build a real CubeSat system that can be launched and that can function in space. Thus, this paper proposes engineering methodologies and tools to help students develop CubeSat systems. These tools can help students with planning, collecting, eliciting and documenting the requirements in a well-defined manner. This paper focuses on student-driven CubeSat projects designed by students and faculty members. Additionally, data is presented in this paper to identify the challenges and needs of CubeSat developers. Plans for future work are also discussed.

Biomedical payloads: A maturing application for CubeSats

“…For cases where using a CubeSat is significantly cheaper for an organisation compared to an ISS mission (e.g., a University that has access to heavily discounted COTS bus products for example), it could even be possibly worthwhile launching multiple CubeSat missions instead. These could give redundancy to the mission, perhaps a good use of resources given academic CubeSats failure rate [72], or allows for an extension to the science goals of the overall mission, while still potentially costing less than one ISS payload life-cycle.…”

Academic application of trade‐off studies to support a CubeSat project

“…The CSRM provides an architecture and components for developing a CubeSat logical and physical architecture. Several CubeSat teams have used versions of the model in their work (Spangelo 2013, Alanazi and Straub 2019, Gregory 2020.…”

Verification Approaches for Nano- and Micro-Satellites

“…As recalled in Section 1, nano-satellites are an invaluable educational tool for universities. Alanazi and Straub [5] provide a survey of student-driven CubeSat projects designed by students and faculty members. They present data to identify the challenges and needs of CubeSat developers, investigating reasons for a mission failure from students' perspectives.…”