Conference report: Modular architecture for small satellites

A conference about small satellites was held today at ETSIT-UPM. It was part of the seminar “Advances in Electronic Systems Engineering”, organized by the Department of Electronic Engineering (Departamento de Ingeniería Electrónica, DIE).

Today, professor Claudio Passerone, from the Electronic and Telecommunication Department of Politecnico di Torino has presented the platform known as Aramis.

Aramis is a modular platform for small satellites that is being developed at the Electronic and Telecommunication Department of Politecnico di Torino. Aramis is based on the concept of tiles, a standardized building block to be used to build small spacecrafts according to specific requirements. By combining tiles in various number and kind, different satellites in terms of size, shape, functionality and performance can be obtained. To drive costs down, commercial off-the-shelf components (COTS) are used wherever possible.

In this interesting seminar we got to learn about a new standardized platform and compare its possibilities with cubesats. We want to thank professor Passerone for having been here today and we wish him and his team good luck to continue with this amazing project.

The two kind of tiles arranged to form a cube

TelCUBE at SATELEC 2012

Once again, TelCUBE has taken part in the recent edition of SATELEC, the Employement and Techonology Forum that is held every year at ETSIT-UPM.

In this conference, Prof. Ramón Martínez and Javier Hernando have presented some concepts and ideas about cubesats and have summarized the main activities that TelCUBE has been developing in the last year, as the participation in the Mission Idea Contest, the QB50 project or the GENSO ground station that is currently being built at ETSIT-UPM.

SATELEC, that this year organizes the 38th edition of this forum has the goal of bringing together business and educational communities. In this context, students could know the different opportunities they have to work in the space industry and how an university project based on cubesats as TelCUBE can help them to reach the goal of working in this industry.

As part of this conference, a Regional Seminar of the Nano-Satellite Mission Idea Contest has also been held, to explain the students how they can take part in the second edition of the contest. With the presence of the regional coordinators Ramón Martínez and Hector Bedón, Prof. Martínez has explained the main criteria of the contest and shared with the attendants the experiences of the first edition, where our members Miguel Gallego and Javier Hernando became semifinalists with their proposal Fire Alarm Constellation.

SATELEC 2012 at ETSIT-UPM

Javier Hernando

Prof. Ramón Martínez

Héctor Bedón and Ramón Martínez

Miguel Gallego, Javier Hernando and Ramón Martínez

We would like to thank the Organising Committee of SATELEC XXXVIII Edition for helping us be there one more year. We hope to come back again in future editions.

TelCUBE with Mars500

Today a press conference has been held at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Madrid to talk about the simulation Mars500 with some of the crewmembers.

Mars500 is the first full-duration simulation of a human mission to Mars, in a mock-up space infrastructure faithfully replicating almost all aspects of real spaceflight – except for weightlessness, radiation and actual interplanetary spaceflight. During the almost 1.5-year duration, the international crew comprising two Europeans, three Russians and one Chinese have ‘flown’ to Mars, ‘landed’ on their destination planet and made several spacewalks on the look-a-like martian terrain. They have been faced with monotony, delayed communications and complete lack of daylight in their windowless habitat.

The crew consists of ESA-selected Diego Urbina (Italian/Colombian) and Romain Charles (French); Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexei Sitev and Alexandr Smoleevski from Russia; and Wang Yue from China. In this press conference, we have been with the representatives of ESA Diego Urbina, Romain Charles and also Dr. Elena Feichtinger, Project Manager of Mars500.

Technical University of Madrid has been represented in this meeting by students of Satellite Communications and from the Master in Space Technologies, and also by members of TelCUBE. It has been really interesting to listen to the crew talking about their experience in this simulation that could be very important to prepare future real missions to Mars. They have explained some of the purposes of the mission, such as the Verification of the methods and means of control and monitoring of the habitat, the simulation of the activity of the crew on the surface of Mars and operations during the flight and the organization of the activity of the crew and its communication with the ground-based control center.

The full conference can be watched at the ESA website, but we also want to share with us some pictures to show you what we saw.

'Castillo de Aulencia', the nice location of ESAC

Press conference

Dr. Elena Feichtinger, Romain Charles and Diego Urbina

Students of the Technical University of Madrid

TelCUBE at E-USOC

This November, the members of TelCUBE Project visited E-USOC (Spanish User Support and Operations Center) as part of the activities of the XI Week of Science. This center is specialized in research and development of space technology and microgravity science, and it is part of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). Its main activity is to supervise different kinds of experiments carried out in the ISS (Columbus Laboratory). Particularly, they watch over experiments dealing with Fluid Dynamics (FS Laboratory). E-USOC is also in charge of the access to some Low Gravity Platforms supervised by ESA.

During the visit, the team could observe the control room, from where communications between Earth and ISS are held, and even watch a real communication between E-USOC and other control center. E-USOC's facilities provide the infrastructure necessary to prepare experiments and operate them remotely. One of these services is the Clean Room, a special room isolated from any kind of pollution or distortion from the exterior, and it is used to test experiments before they are launched. The team visited this room, although it was observed from the ou

tside, due to the severe security measures.

Moreover, the team was shown one of the scientific experiments that are probe to be launched in a short period of time, dealing with fluid dynamics. This experiment tried to show that fluid's surface vibrations in microgravity are very different from the ones seen under normal gravity conditions (Faraday's Waves).

We are really glad to have been there and we hope to enjoy more visits like that in future.

XI Week of Science

As part of the activities of the XI Week of Science held as every November in Madrid, TelCUBE has organized a conference to make known the concepts of small satellites and cubesats, and also explain the activities that are being developed by TelCUBE Project.

Professor Ramón Martínez has talked about how universities and companies use small satellites to develop low cost missions, explaining the opportunities that students have to be part of a real space project. In addition, some of the recent activities of TelCUBE have been presented, as the development of our future GENSO ground station and the second edition of the Mission Idea Contest.

We are really glad to see all the interest from many people to attend to this conference and he hope to show you more things about our activities in future.

AGI STK Software Summit

Members of TelCUBE Project have attended today to the STK Software Summit, an event organized by Analytical Graphics Inc. in Madrid.

Last year, our team members were already part of their Global Tech Tour and this time we have also seen very interesting presentations like the latest developments about their Space Situation Awareness (SSA) Software Suite, the Orbit Determination Tool Kit and the new applications to multi-domain communications analysis.

We would like to thank AGI, the sponsor that kindly provide us student licenses of their software Satellite Tool Kit (STK), for inviting us to this event; and we hope to meet them again in the future.

Photos of the 2nd QB50 Workshop

Some weeks after the 2nd QB50 Workshop in Belgium, we continue working in our different projects. But as we also like to offer you information about our activities further from the work in a laboratory, with the collaboration of our friends from the Technical University of Budapest (Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem, BME), we bring you today some new photos of the Workshop that was held at the VKI.

We wish you enjoy them and we hope it help to increase your interest in the different projects based on small satellites that are being developed all around the world.

Of course, you can see the full set of photos at the Masat-1 website.