Abstract

Abstract The University of Southern California’s Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) developed a 3U CubeSat, designed, built, and tested by graduate and undergraduate students utilizing an engineering” teaching hospital” environment for hands-on learning. The 3U “Dodona” mission is to send to orbit a payload for our research sponsor, providing power and data connections, as well as data forwarding to the ground using on-board UHF telemetry system. Roughly 2U of the satellite are reserved for flight processors, power systems, and attitude control system and sensors. Generally, university CubeSat efforts are challenged by lack of time, funding and personnel turnover that end up skimping completion of a full hardware checkout and in-depth failure mode analysis prior to delivery. Statistically, 50% of CubeSat missions fail, not due to a lack of knowledge but a lack of documentation and testing generally in the critical integration and test phase. To avoid this, SERC sought to develop a rigorous top-down approach from the project start, focusing on validating requirements of the sponsor and the realistic/potential failure modes from similar missions. Using a top-down approach, we were able to update the components from a legacy bus system and setup detailed test procedures to test all subsystems, both independently and integrated, in the same manner that it would operate in flight, throughout the integration and test phase of the project. As background, the Dodona CubeSat is built on the Pumpkin COLONY I bus architecture, from one of the last remaining from the initial stock manufactured in 2008. The satellite will be placed into a …

Date

August 11, 2025

Authors

Rahul Rughani, R Rogers, J Allam, Sriram Narayanan, Piyush Patil, Kyle Clarke, Marcel Lariviere, Justin Du Plessis, Lizvette Villafana, Denis Healy10, Sofia Bernstein11, David A Barnhart12

Journal

70th International Astronautical Congress