Space Systems Engineering Education by Providing Hands-on Practices Using Pico-Satellite Training Kit

Space Systems Engineering Education by Providing Hands-on Practices Using Pico-Satellite Training Kit

We developed new hands-on type course and tool for space systems engineering. This is one of the courses at Aerospace Engineering, College of Science Technology, Nihon University. The goal of the course is to provide the students with space systems engineering experience by assembly, integration & test (AI & T) of “classroom picosatellite kit HEPTA-Sat”. We report the effects of the course and details of pico-satellite kit HEPTA-Sat in this paper. There are two major contributions. The first is that we provide learning opportunity to students with varied background from departments of art, government officials and general public as student from aerospace engineering. The second is that the course focuses on verification and validation (V&V) through software and hardware AI & T of pico-satellite kit HEPTA-Sat. We analyzed the effects of the course on the students and found out that the course helped them understand space systems engineering in a short amount of time (ex. 1 day to 1 trimester) and very lowcost rather than conventional space engineering educational kit. These have not been realized in any of the previous engineering courses worldwide.