Session
Pre-Conference Poster Session II
Location
Utah State University, Logan, UT
Abstract
This paper presents a scalable design of a small satellite chassis for the ThinSat Program. This versatile chassis will fly on Virginia Tech’s ThinSat mission in 2020, VT ThickSat. By incrementing the volume of the satellite chassis, students from Virginia Tech introduce a unique capability that combines the ThinSat’s rapid deployment with upscaled payload sizes. The scalable solution reflects an expansion of the original ThinSat 1T chassis up to nearly that of a1U CubeSat. Enabling the accommodation of larger educational and research payloads using the same proven flight hardware as the 1T option, a family of alternative vehicles for institutions previously constrained to the more expensive CubeSat platform can be realized for low-altitude, short-duration missions. The chassis design offers an attractive alternative to educational CubeSat builds, putting the experiment in primary focus rather than using resources on a build-to-suit vehicle design. With rapid development capabilities and reasonable cost, the capability described here introduces an incremental synergy for nanosatellite space applications as well as building the potential to test and prove out further capabilities for the entire SmallSat community.
Paper for VT ThickSat: A Scalable Chassis in the ThinSat Program
VT ThickSat: A Scalable Chassis in the ThinSat Program
Utah State University, Logan, UT
This paper presents a scalable design of a small satellite chassis for the ThinSat Program. This versatile chassis will fly on Virginia Tech’s ThinSat mission in 2020, VT ThickSat. By incrementing the volume of the satellite chassis, students from Virginia Tech introduce a unique capability that combines the ThinSat’s rapid deployment with upscaled payload sizes. The scalable solution reflects an expansion of the original ThinSat 1T chassis up to nearly that of a1U CubeSat. Enabling the accommodation of larger educational and research payloads using the same proven flight hardware as the 1T option, a family of alternative vehicles for institutions previously constrained to the more expensive CubeSat platform can be realized for low-altitude, short-duration missions. The chassis design offers an attractive alternative to educational CubeSat builds, putting the experiment in primary focus rather than using resources on a build-to-suit vehicle design. With rapid development capabilities and reasonable cost, the capability described here introduces an incremental synergy for nanosatellite space applications as well as building the potential to test and prove out further capabilities for the entire SmallSat community.
