Mission Design for the CubeSat OUFTI-1

Space is probably the main symbol of technological progress in the modernsociety.Many daily activities imply the interaction with this environment that only fewjudge able to supply so many resources. Actually, despite to its guise of modernity,the space conquest began many years ago when the planets motion wasstudied more in details and the Kepler’s laws were formulated at the beginningof XVII century. The climb to the peak was accelerated by one of the most genialpersonality of the history of physics, Isaac Newton. Forced to interrupt itsuniversity studies because of an epidemic disease in England, he moved to thecountryside where he began studying the motion of celestial bodies. Quickly hemodeled the celestial mechanics as no one had never done before and he identifiedthe gravitational force and the expressions of all the possible trajectories thata body can follow in space. In all his studies, he used only one hypothesis thathe was not able to justify: the gravitational potential of a point is equal to thatof a sphere having the same mass and uniformly distributed density. Becauseof that, he left behind for many years one of the most important results of thehistory of physics.All around the world only few people are able to design space missions. Thefew lucky who can, every time they do it, use as starting point the results of anuniversity student lived 400 years ago.