Master Thesis - OUFTI-1

6.3 Parallel activities
This project, which is a particular subject for a master thesis, gives to the students the
opportunity to take part in a lot of parallel activities, such as ESA conferences or CubeSat
meetings all over the world. So, the activities, in which I am directly involved, performed
during this academic year, will be presented here:
• The rst activity, which set at Royal Meteorological Institute (IRM) based at Bruxelles
(Belgium), was a general public presentation. During this activity, the goal
was to present the project to people that has no knowledge, or nearly, of the space
activities. It allows us to go one's rst steps inside the project and to familiarize us
with its multidisciplinary aspects.
• The second activity, which set at CSL (Belgium), was a conference with the Del-C 3
team. During this activity, presentations of the two teams' projects were realized. It
allows us to exchange several points of view with them and to move forward in our
understanding of constraints imposed by the space environment.
• The following activity was the Interface Technical Review (ITR), which set at the
EuroSpace Center of Redu (Belgium). At this moment, each student had all the technical
background necessary to accomplish his personal work. Before going to Redu,
each of them had to provide a data package including all the interfaces between his
subsystem and the other ones, and internal interfaces inside his own subsystem [62].
For each of these interfaces, a technical solution was proposed by the students who
are in charge of the concerned subsystems. Then, during the weekend spent to Redu,
several meetings were realized. These meetings concerned the four general categories
of interfaces that exist in a satellite, including: mechanical, thermal, electrical and
data interfaces. They involved the students of the OUFTI team, the system engineering
team, the project managers, the professors and several industrial specialists.
During these meetings, each solution was studied with the help of all this sta, and
was approved or improved to fulll the requirements imposed to it. This activity allowed
to dene precisely all the interfaces present inside the CubeSat and to highlight
them, and brought to each student involved in the project, a better understanding
of the overall satellite. It allowed also to take a big step for the project achievement
by emerging from an Interface Control Document (ICD) for OUFTI-1.
• Finally, the last activity during this year, was the Workshop on the Verication of
the CubeSats for the Vega Maiden Flight, which set at ESTEC (The Netherlands).
During this workshop, the verication concept and the acceptance data package were
introduced. These concepts are really important because they include all the verications
which must be performed on each CubeSat before delivering it to ESA. The
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