Picosatellite System

The Mothership-Daugthership Mission Architecture

Recently, a new mission architecture has been suggested to perform distributed sensing in space.  In this architecture, a main satellite, or "mothership", deploys a number of smaller satellites, or "daughterships", to remote locations of interest to perform the required sensing.  To date, several missions have placed one or two sensors in interesting locations, but placing dozens or hundreds of them remains a challenge.  Due to increased interest in distributed sensing in space, new technologies need to be developed.  The mothership technologies include picosatellite storage, deployment, communication, and retrieval or disposal.  The daughtership technologies include all the necessary miniaturizations of current satellite technology to meet the picosatellite scale.  The primary mission of the OPAL picosatellite payload is to validate the mothership mission architecture and provide a basic testbed to develop the mothership and daughtership technologies.

To the right is an artist's rendition of the OPAL satellite with a picosatellite being deployed (picture by Clem Tillier).
 

The Mothership

The OPAL design team will focus on mothership technology development.  A picosatellite launcher is under development that addresses the storage and deployment technologies.  The launcher is being designed for scalability, manufacturability, and reliability.  It will be capable of launching at least three picosatellites.  The following pages describe the OPAL picosatellite launcher:

• Picosatellite Mission Statement
• Design Requirements
• Design Implementation

The Daughtership

The  daughterships are called picosatellites because of their low mass (less than 1 kg). To satisfy OPAL's end-to-end mission demonstration, the picosatellites will be capable of communicating data to the ground, either directly or through a communication system onboard OPAL.  The picosatellites will be built by the following design teams:
 

Primary Picosatellites:
 
• The Artemis Team - An undergraduate team from Santa Clara University will use an iterative design process to continually explore the technical capabilities and mission applications of picosatellites.
• STENSAT - Stensat is a small (12 cubic inch, 1 pound) satellite which is intended for use by amateur radio operators world wide and will operate as a single channel mode "J" FM voice repeater.  It is being built by a group of HAMs from the Washington, D.C. area.
• The DARPA Team - DARPA is sponsoring The Aerospace Corporation, UCLA, and the Rockwell Science Center, to develop a picosatellite to test an intersatellite communication scheme and to characterize a MEMS RF switch.  A detailed presentation of their design can be found here.


Secondary Picosatellites:
 

• The HAM Team - A group of amateur radio enthusiasts will build a picosatellite that will download  telemetry and sensor data directly to the ground.

During the picosatellite payload development, several studies and interface documents have been created.  They are listed blow.

• Technical papers
• Picosatellite Launch Dynamics
• Picosatellite Thermal Modeling
• Picosatellite Interface Document
• Revision G - Released October 9, 1998 (If the picosatellite drawing does not print well, here is the gif version.)