On-Orbit Operation Results of the World's First CubeSat XI-IV – Lessons Learned from Its Successful 15-years Space Flight

On-Orbit Operation Results of the World's First CubeSat XI-IV – Lessons Learned from Its Successful 15-years Space Flight

Utah State University, Logan, UT

In recent years, the size and cost of satellites have been reduced, and the frequent launch of satellites have been realized even by small private companies and universities. The first step of this big wave was the first successful launch of CubeSats, 1kg nano-satellites, in June 2003. One of the CubeSats was XI-IV, which was developed by Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory (ISSL) of the University of Tokyo. Its mission was the world’s first on-orbit demonstration of the CubeSat bus system. Due to the spatial, power and cost constraints, most of the bus system was composed of low-cost COTS parts, and a “cross-check” type fault redundancy system against the radiation effects was implemented to achieve as better reliability as possible within the resource constraints. Since the successful launch by the ROCKOT launch vehicle from Russia, the satellite has been in normal operation for over fifteen years since the launch (as of June 2019). The operation has been jointly conducted by the University of Tokyo and amateur radio operators in Japan. This paper reports its more-than-15-years world's longest CubeSat operation results and the lessons learned from it.