Design of hundered gram Femtosatellite made from commercially available parts

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is femtosatellite, a new class of spacecraft with a mass of only a hundred grams. The goal of the work is to evaluate the feasibility of a femtosatellite made from commercially available subsystems and components. To achieve this goal, a femtosatellite is designed based on careful analysis of every subsystem in the small satellite.

Different options for various subsystems are presented, and selection between suitable subsystems is performed. Moreover, some parts of the satellite are designed during this work. For example, a circular patch antenna is designed with Computer

Simulated Technology (CST) software manufactured by Microwave Studio software suite. The satellite design is based on a commercially available Raspberry Pi Zero computer and the payload of the satellite is an optical camera.

For the system, a careful analysis is performed with regarding the link budget, energy budget, and mass budget. Moreover, the operational scenarios are simulated to assure the ability of the satellite to send and receive images taken from LEO orbit.

The work also gives an overview of previous designs and studies carried out on femtosatellite concepts and compares them to larger satellites in terms of cost, structure, and also functionality.