Mission Design for the CubeSat OUFTI-1

CHAPTER6STRUCTURE AND DEPLOYMENTA CubeSat is a 10 cm cube with a mass up to 1 Kg: the structure’s shape iscompulsory and its mass has to be reduced at most. Furthermore, the OUFTI-1schedule is really challenging as the foreseen development time varies betweentwo and two and an half year. For these reasons, we chose to buy an off the shelfstructure. If on the one hand developing our own structure would have helpedin reaching the educational goal which characterized the project, on the otherhand it would have required a great amount of time and resources not availableat the moment and the result would have probably been less successful.As mentioned in paragraph 4.1, being a CubeSat impose some precise characteristics( for more details see [AD4]). Furthermore, the European SpaceAgency add in its Call for proposal [RD2] a precise requirements: two separationswitches are compulsory on Vega.There are actually on the market two CubeSat structure developers: Pumpkinand ISIS. Both the two structures have their advantages and drawbacks thatwill be exposed in the following paragraph. After an accurate analysis we chosethe structure of Pumpkin as it better fits our requirements not only in terms ofstructure performances but also in terms of provided services.Concerning the antennas deployment system, they have to be folded duringlaunch and deployed once in orbit. To this end, they will be wrapped aroundcontact points and maintained in this configuration using the deployment mechanism.57