Mission Design for the CubeSat OUFTI-1

CHAPTER4THE CUBESAT OUFTI-1OUFTI-1 is a CubeSat representing the first step of the LEODIUM Project:it’s also the first satellite of the University of Liège and the first Picosatelliteever made in Belgium. It’s an amateur radio satellite exploiting the digitalcommunicationD-STAR protocol and it’s not going to carry any scientific payloadbut it will mainly be used as a test for the D-STAR system into space: itcan be viewed as a bare-bone repeater in space.Furthermore, the OUFTI-1 bus could be used in the future as standard platformfor the next CubeSats of the University of Liège. As they will have somescientific experiments on-board, the use of an already tested platform will allowto concentrate the effort on the payload and on the mission analysis in orderto reach the target in the best way as possible. Moreover, once the scientificmission will have finished, the CubeSat will be used by the amateur radio community:in return, we can communicate with the ground station trough thefrequency bandwidth reserved for the amateur radio communications.The main constraint for this mission is the time line: the launch is in factscheduled for December 2008 and the project started in November 2007. Evenif two years are considered sufficient for the design and operation of a CubeSatmission, we need to optimize the time and to proceed as quickly as possible.For this reason we assumed the principle of KISS, Keep It Simple and Stupid.We are in fact convinced that between two possible solutions that guarantee thesame final result, the most convenient is the simplest: guided by this idea, allthe choices are taken in order to simplify the design.Before proceeding with the satellite description, an introduction to the CubeSatconcept and to the D-STAR system is presented.19