Abstract
The space industry is one of today’s major growth markets and a very interesting business sector for innovation, science, and technology. In the last century, the space industry has dramatically changed and undergone strong commercialization referred to as “New Space”. In addition to the commercialization, the concept of CubeSats has become well established in the market during the last decade. The European Space Agency (ESA) has acknowledged this trend and uses CubeSat nanosatellites for projects like the OPS-SAT mission. OPS-SAT uses state-of-the-art embedded systems for various tasks. These embedded systems are the key for the great mission success of OPS-SAT and provide outstanding computational power for various experiments conducted with the OPS-SAT flying laboratory. This paper describes the fundamental design of these embedded systems and discusses some of the related achievements during the OPS-SAT mission.
Highlights
The space industry is one of today’s major growth markets and a very interesting business sector for innovation, science and technology
The comparison of the characteristics of the OPSSAT CubeSat bus and payload devices gives rise to the conclusion that most of these devices are embedded systems, because they contain processing units designed for a special purpose and interact with the onboard systems and the physical space environment
In the course of OPS-SAT commissioning, we discovered that the sun and the nadir pointing with the CubeSat bus ADCS was not working properly
Summary
The space industry is one of today’s major growth markets and a very interesting business sector for innovation, science and technology. The success of many nanosatellite missions has shown that the use of commercial COTS hardware and software, in combination with screening and testing, yields very good results [2]. Such nanosatellites are often less expensive, but very powerful systems with the outstanding performance and functionality of state-of-the-art products. CubeSats are especially interesting for universities and companies that want to develop economic satellites in a relatively short time frame. The European Space Agency (ESA) has acknowledged this trend and uses CubeSat nanosatellites for some missions These missions include the OPS-SAT mission, where ESA is acting as the sole owner and operator of a CubeSat for the first time. The OPS-SAT satellite is successfully operated in space
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
