'FLY YOUR SATELLITE!': APPROACH AND LESSONS LEARNED

摘要

This paper describes the lessons learned during the first phases of the "Fly Your Satellite!" (FYS) CubeSat programme carried out by the Education Office of the European Space Agency (ESA). Within the FYS framework, the ESA Education Office supports university teams to conduct the verification campaign of their CubeSat, in order to introduce them to methods and best practices commonly used in ESA and other space agency programmes, with two main objectives: first of all, offer the students an important educational opportunity to perform the verification of their satellite with the support of ESA specialists, and also of improving student teams' mission success chances. Support for the launch opportunity will be offered to those teams which demonstrate their CubeSat's flight worthiness based on the review of their design, thorough testing, and of their verification documentation. The FYS programme offers to the participating student teams the possibility to have their work supervised by ESA specialists thus facilitating knowledge transfer from experienced professionals to students. Besides, CubeSat teams are able to access state of the art test facilities for the environmental tests campaign (vibrations and thermal vacuum). FYS is structured in 4 phases: the programme started with the Flight Model (FM) integration, and will continue up to the beginning of the mission operations. The participating teams are requested to provide to ESA their CubeSat design and testing documentation, for review by ESA specialists, and must comply with the international regulations applicable to spacecraft registration and space debris mitigation guidelines. The first two phases of "Fly Your Satellite!" focused on the review of the design, and on the preparation and conduct of the functional and environmental test campaigns, in both laboratory and space representative conditions. Throughout the first two phases of the programme, a number of issues as well as good practices were identified in almost all aspects of CubeSat projects from project management, to technical design (including testing campaigns), to compliance with international regulations. The experience gained during FYS Phases 1 and 2 as well as the previous small satellite programmes of the Education Office, enables the authors to indicate several lessons learned that are presented in this paper, with the aim of helping student teams and professors/researchers which are considering to engage in small-satellite development projects. In particular it is aimed at those teams that are willing to develop their spacecraft taking into account aspects of "good engineering practice", with the intention to include in the development a suitable verification campaign of the design requirements and by such, increasing the confidence in the success of their mission.