Author: Alexander Doknjas

The ORCASat team has decided to start a blog. As of September 2021, we have officially kicked off our Assembly, Integration, and Testing phase of the project, marked by completion of the FlatSat v1 milestone. We realized that after more than three years of development, the most exciting phase of the ORCASat project is happening right now, and we want to document it and share it with everyone who is interested. We decided the most effective way of doing this is to write up short blog posts about the interesting events that have happened. Examples of blog posts may include events such as successfully completing an interesting test, first look at assembled systems/subsystems, or reaching a milestone. The blog will most serve as a photo gallery with a little bit of background information on what we are doing in the photos and why it’s important. We thought it is fitting to have the first blog post commemorating our success with assembling FlatSat v1, which is the first look at what the actual ORCASat spacecraft will look like.

FlatSat is a shortened name for Flat Satellite. It is a conglomeration of the different electronics the spacecraft requires to function and complete its mission, without needing to actually assemble the full spacecraft. From a physical standpoint, FlatSat looks nothing like the spacecraft. But from an electrical and software standpoint, it’s identical, and it’s an extremely useful platform for testing electrical and software interfaces between the different subsystems. It allows us to perform integration testing much sooner.

FlatSat v1 is the first FlatSat and will be continuously updated as new hardware is finished and added in for testing. Our FlatSat v1 consists of an on-board computer, a payload, a space segment radio, and a ground segment radio. We are able to use our ground control software to uplink a command to the FlatSat via the ground segment radio over a wireless link. The uplink command has instructions for how the payload should operate. The on-board computer interprets the command and forwards it to the payload. Upon receiving the command, the payload executes a payload operation as desired by the ground control operators. The payload generates data which is required to be downlinked. We are also able to demonstrate the data downlink on FlatSat v1, but the data we get down is packetized from the radio, and we currently do not have an easy-to-use parsing tool to restructure the data back to human readable format.

The next steps are to power everything off the new power system which we will be adding in the next couple of weeks. This FlatSat version will be known as FlatSat v2 and we will share this milestone once it’s completed.