The UKSEDS Satellite Design Competition and the Future of STRATHcube
StrathAIS’ latest endeavor is an entry into yet another competition by and for people who never left their house even before the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, it’s the UKSEDS Satellite Design Competition. Our newly formed CubeSats team is made up of 13 “well rounded individuals” (who are definitely proficient in Excel), and we recently reached the first stage of the competition, submitting our Preliminary Design Review (PDR). We’d like to tell you about our design and how we hope this is preparing our students for the future of the STRATHcube project.
The UKSEDS Satellite Design Competition (run in conjunction with SSPI), invites students to open their text editor of choice, and add this competition’s title and description to their CV. Ok, I admit, that’s only part of it. The competition actually invites students to design, construct and operate a Nanosatellite payload system in a Simulated Lunar Environment. This aims to challenge students to perform a complex, and low budget, Systems Engineering task to meet a set of real space mission requirements. The Simulated Lunar Environment, known as the “Mystery Room”, houses different sources of information to be analysed. However, the layout of the Mystery Room is concealed from the teams until competition day. The payload system should be able to detect and analyse data from:
Objects of Interest (craters, rocks, the Flat Earth, etc.)
Thermal sources of ranging temperatures (-25 to 100 degrees)
Light sources of ranging wavelengths and intensities
Electromagnetic signals (915-921 MHz)
We have just reached the PDR stage, with the Critical Design Review to be submitted in March. The designs will be judged by a panel of Space Industry Engineers and UKSEDS members. The best three will get to construct and test their system. These teams will also have their work published by SSPI.
A Nanosatellite (no matter the complexity or budget) is a highly multidisciplinary system, and this is reflected in our members. With the team being led by the two most rounded individuals and senior StrathAIS members (Rory Hope and Ciaran Jenkins), overseeing Electrical, Mechanical, and Aerospace Engineering students at many different stages in their degrees. To tackle the competition, we first divided ourselves into 5 subsystems: Payloads, AOCS, Power, Communications & Data Handling, and Systems Engineering. Each sub team researched and proposed components which would satisfy the system and subsystem level requirements. Six configurations were then outlined by the Systems Engineering, to perform a trade-off analysis on. The final payload selections from this trade-off were:
Optical Camera and LIDAR Module – Objects of Interest
Small Thermal Camera – Heat Detection
Spectroscopy and Lux Sensors – Light Detection
Simple Duck Antenna and Radio Module – EM Signal Detection
The Payloads team are working to create a tilting plate mechanism to mount these on. This will increase the field of view of the sensors, which will be beneficial as data sources will be placed across the Mystery Room at elevation angles ranging from -90 to +90 degrees. The central computer of the system is a Raspberry Pi 4, who’s built in Wi-Fi module will be used for communication with the control room. A power distribution system is being designed to supply the necessary regulated voltages to each subsystem from a battery. Finally, the AOCS team have designed a system for the satellite to rotate around its vertical axis to a desired azimuth angle (as shown below).
Our proposed AOCS system architecture
Ok, so we’re not quite on Clyde Space’s level (yet…), but I would say it’s a been a good effort so far. We hope to continue our great work and go as far possible in this competition. But for us, this is only a short-term goal. The STRATHcube Critical Design Review is set for May, however, Elon Musk hasn’t replied to any of the DM’s I sent him on Twitter, so a launch in the near future is highly unlikely. With all members of StrathAIS that are currently working on STRATHcube in the final year of their degrees, we need people to pick up the mantle and continue where we left off. We’d rather see the CubeSat crash and burn later, when it is intended (we actually do, see our blog series on the Re-Entry Payload), not figuratively because there was no one there to turn up to meetings. So, we want the students participating in this competition to carry on their enthusiasm and see STRATHcube through to the end.
We understand this design challenge does not fully reflect the work required to develop an actual Nanosatellite. So, to get our team up to speed, some members working on STRATHcube have been holding virtual, introductory workshops on their field of expertise. These have included such (exciting) topics as Systems Engineering, Mission Analysis, and RF Communications. These workshops are also recorded, so the students can complete them in their own time, if the live session is missed. The workshops have provided the team with a good baseline, but we plan to step up their complexity in the coming semester to really show what it takes to design a space-grade system.
One of our well rounded individuals presenting a workshop
In all seriousness, the CubeSats team do leave their house, and are a genuinely passionate group of young Engineers looking to apply their skills and knowledge beyond just their classes. This competition is a great way for us to train future STRATHcube members - and have fun while doing it - so we’d like to genuinely thank UKSEDS for giving students the opportunity to compete and learn. We are confident that our team could go on to do great things in the future. Who knows, all going well, they might even have the potential to be the next generation of panel members on a competition like this. Anyway, we hope to update you on our progress after the CDR in March.
Cheers!
Rory Hope (a well rounded individual who leaves his house regularly)
