ESA is developing a mini-satellite to test out radically new control systems and techniques and to demonstrate drastically improved mission control capabilities that will arise when satellites can fly more powerful on-board computers. Known as Ops-Sat, the satellite is made up of three standardized 10 x 10 x 10 centimeter CubeSat units with deployable solar panels on each side. Although the satellite is only 30 centimeters high, it contains an experimental computer 10 times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft.
Achieving performance and safety at a low cost is always a challenge. To do this, OPS-SAT combines off-the-shelf subsystems, as typically used with cubesats, with the latest terrestrial microelectronics for the on-board computer. Experimental software will be uploaded to the satellite each day, along with its ground system. The interface between the experimenters, mission planning and operations is a server repository, where the experiments and their respective configurations are uploaded by the experimenters, and after execution on the validation benches the corresponding results, logs and data are made available.
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The in-orbit laboratory will offer a range of resources that includes processors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), cameras, and an attitude determination and control system, all of which will be available to experimenters to demonstrate new mission and operations concepts. State-of-the-art semiconductor technologies, in particular very powerful computing platforms and FPGAs, are required in orbit to satisfy the OPS-SAT objectives.
OPS-SAT will be an in-orbit test-bed for:
- On-board software applications
- Advanced communication protocols
- Compression techniques
- Demonstration of advanced software-defined radio concepts
- Optical communication from ground to space
- Experiments using cameras, attitude control, scheduling and autonomy
Experiments with ground-based applications can also be hosted.
Satellite Architecture
As outlined on ESA’s Web site, the OPS-SAT architecture consists of two major parts. The first part is the OPS-SAT bus responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure to allow the operation of the second part, which is the payload. However, in this case, once the payload is running, it can take over control of the entire satellite while the bus monitors and is ready to take control back at any moment.
The payload itself consists of a processing platform comprising
- a powerful system-on-module and mass memory
- a fine-pointing attitude determination and control system (ADCS) including a star tracker
- a CCSDS-compatible S-band transceiver
- a high-speed X-band transmitter
- a GPS receiver
- a high-definition camera
- an optical receiver
- a software-defined radio receiver
The execution of the in-orbit experiments will be constantly monitored, and any failure of an experiment will not compromise the mission. Each hardware payload is attached to the underlying bus system in order to assure that any loss or malfunction of one subsystem will not affect the rest of the system, and redundancies are foreseen for the processing platform, since it is the most critical part of the mission.
The flying software lab is due for launch in 2017, and more than 100 companies and institutions from 17 European countries have registered experimental proposals to fly.
