Session
Poster Session 2
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
Alpha CubeSat is a 1U CubeSat designed, built, and operated by a student-led team at Cornell University. Its primary mission is to deploy a free-flying lightsail in low Earth orbit, carrying gram-scale "ChipSat" flight computers as a demonstration of low-cost distributed sensing in space. The spacecraft was built around commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, including a Teensy 3.5 microcontroller as the primary flight computer and a RockBLOCK Iridium modem for communication, and was developed and flown under the constraints that define a student program: a small power budget, a rotating team, limited development time, and an intermittent operations radio link. The CubeSat reached orbit and successfully deployed its light sail, fulfilling its primary objective.
The flight software is responsible for orchestrating every operational activity aboard the spacecraft. It manages the CubeSat's behavior as a set of discrete operational states. Within those states it exchanges commands and telemetry with mission control over the Iridium link, collects and stores onboard sensor data, operates the Attitude Control System (ACS), and triggers the light sail release. Because power is a binding constraint on the platform, every long-duration software state was designed and verified to keep the spacecraft power-positive.
The ground station software complements the flight software by making mission operations accessible to a student team and supporting remote, collaborative operation. Delivered as a web-based application, it provides an interface for composing and uplinking commands through the RockBLOCK portal to the Iridium constellation, and dashboards for visualizing downlinked telemetry and mission data in real time, allowing operators to monitor spacecraft health and mission progress during flight. A separate public-facing dashboard extended this visibility to a general audience, engaging thousands of people worldwide during the primary mission.
The flight and ground systems were validated together through extensive hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing, in which the real flight software ran on flight-representative hardware while operators issued commands and interpreted telemetry through the actual ground station, closing the full operational loop. These sessions functioned as end-to-end mission rehearsals that let the team practice nominal operations exactly as they would be conducted in flight, and they provided a controlled environment for deliberately exercising edge cases such as power cycles, sensor faults, dropped or out-of-order messages, and off-nominal state transitions.
Together, the flight and ground software form a cohesive end-to-end system. This poster describes each in turn, along with the integration testing campaign that tied them together.
The GitHub organization for Alpha CubeSat with the flight and ground station software repositories can be found at Reference 1.
Document Type
Event
Paper
Included in
Software for the Alpha CubeSat Mission: System Architecture, Development, and Testing Behind Successful Flight Operations
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Alpha CubeSat is a 1U CubeSat designed, built, and operated by a student-led team at Cornell University. Its primary mission is to deploy a free-flying lightsail in low Earth orbit, carrying gram-scale "ChipSat" flight computers as a demonstration of low-cost distributed sensing in space. The spacecraft was built around commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, including a Teensy 3.5 microcontroller as the primary flight computer and a RockBLOCK Iridium modem for communication, and was developed and flown under the constraints that define a student program: a small power budget, a rotating team, limited development time, and an intermittent operations radio link. The CubeSat reached orbit and successfully deployed its light sail, fulfilling its primary objective.
The flight software is responsible for orchestrating every operational activity aboard the spacecraft. It manages the CubeSat's behavior as a set of discrete operational states. Within those states it exchanges commands and telemetry with mission control over the Iridium link, collects and stores onboard sensor data, operates the Attitude Control System (ACS), and triggers the light sail release. Because power is a binding constraint on the platform, every long-duration software state was designed and verified to keep the spacecraft power-positive.
The ground station software complements the flight software by making mission operations accessible to a student team and supporting remote, collaborative operation. Delivered as a web-based application, it provides an interface for composing and uplinking commands through the RockBLOCK portal to the Iridium constellation, and dashboards for visualizing downlinked telemetry and mission data in real time, allowing operators to monitor spacecraft health and mission progress during flight. A separate public-facing dashboard extended this visibility to a general audience, engaging thousands of people worldwide during the primary mission.
The flight and ground systems were validated together through extensive hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing, in which the real flight software ran on flight-representative hardware while operators issued commands and interpreted telemetry through the actual ground station, closing the full operational loop. These sessions functioned as end-to-end mission rehearsals that let the team practice nominal operations exactly as they would be conducted in flight, and they provided a controlled environment for deliberately exercising edge cases such as power cycles, sensor faults, dropped or out-of-order messages, and off-nominal state transitions.
Together, the flight and ground software form a cohesive end-to-end system. This poster describes each in turn, along with the integration testing campaign that tied them together.
The GitHub organization for Alpha CubeSat with the flight and ground station software repositories can be found at Reference 1.
