A printed circuit board (PCB) that has been designed for Wentworth Picosat’s on-board computer subsystem. Kieran Shanley, April 2023
Students in the School of Engineering are building an organization around small Earth imaging satellites. Built from scratch, each circuit board is a building block to a complete satellite. The ultimate goal is to create a long-lasting organization around aerospace technology within the school.
For the scope of this organization, a satellite is a piece of technology that is intentionally put into orbit around the Earth. A picosatellite is defined by its dimensions, 555cm, and its weight, less than 250 grams. It’s small enough to conceivably build, but large enough to bring forth the cutting edge of today’s technology. Despite its small volume and thin power constraints, this group has active designs incorporating advanced features such as GPS and magnetically torqueing coils. The primary payload, a high definition image sensor, is the crown jewel of Wentworth’s first satellite. A camera in the pico formfactor is a feat only attempted by a handful of universities internationally. Thus, placing Wentworth on that map would be an incredible feat.
The hardware behind satellites extends far into many technical fields, including electrical & computer engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, mathematics and physics. Each of these fields can be broken down into specialized areas of study, such as orbital physics and circuit analysis. The fields themselves can be broken down further, and at the end of the day, there is unrealized real-estate all over the place. We’re building technology where anyone can join our operations and make improvements, or start new designs altogether.
For picosatellites, the primary components include a metal frame, solar panels, printed circuit boards (PCBs), microcontrollers, active and passive electronics, DRAM and other silicon-based chips, antennas, thermal shielding, radiation protection, and connectors. Each facet of the satellite requires a dedicated team to define the problem, make a solution proposal, and ensure their result meets specification. We may be building a satellite, but what we’re really building is a foundation to keep this effort going for future spacecrafts to be made.
Once launched, it may not be serviced other than remote software updates, meaning the satellite must undergo extreme endurance testing. The group will soon be working with vibration testing, thermal overload testing, and whatever other torture tests that will be required to survive the vacuum of space. It’s extremely harsh out there, so we are performing these tests to ensure that our work will pay off for both the students and the institution.
We need to give every student the opportunity to excel at a very specific technology within the satellite. As students move into the industry, it is critical to have new students trained and ready to take over. Our documentation will always remain for all students to observe.
The end goal for each new member is to help them find their passions, but a delicate process must begin for us to understand their pathway. Say, you contact any one of our members about wanting to know more about PicoSat. We will guide you to the right person, and once you are introduced to our team, we then try to understand your interests through project history. What curiosities lead you to carry out projects of the past? Even if your project has little relevance to our work, distant connections are always possible.
Senior members of PicoSat are ready work individually with each student to draft an action plan, which at first is to simply explore group-curated training material. This process is tailored to each student. The goal is to recognize and embark upon the path between current interests and true passions, which they may not know prior to joining PicoSat.
An RF Network Analyzer being used to perform antenna analysis, likely for the first time in many years.
Once a student is familiarized with the group as a whole, they may join one of four sub-groups that exist within PicoSat: Onboard Computer Subsystem, Electrical Power Subsystem, Communications Subsystem, and Integration/Delivery. Each group has a dedicated lead, who is responsible
for accepting new students to the sub-group, keeping organization of materials, and planning group meetings.
Wentworth PicoSat Group Photo in IEEE Attic Lab, November 2022
Beginning in June of 2021, a small group of underclassmen engineering students began virtual training through engineering professor Saurav Basnet. His connection with aerospace company Orion Space Ltd. Nepal allowed for valuable industry skills to be directed to Wentworth students. Each Sunday morning from June to August of 2021, the group would wake up for 8:00am sharp training sessions. Orion Space, including Rakesh Chandra and Jiten Thapa, were extremely open to answering questions and providing take-home material.
In September of 2021, two picosatellite training kits were mailed across the globe, landing in the hands of the PicoSat group to explore and reverse-engineer. It just so happened that these training kits included use of the ATMega328 microcontroller, which was taught in the school curriculum as part of the freshman-level course Introduction to Engineering. For the next year, the goal of the initiative was to reverse engineer the satellite and begin designs for a new, real satellite that will make its way to outer space.
The Fall of 2022 introduced many new improvements to the group’s operation, including regular, more structured meetings. Sub-groups were now large enough to require leadership and distant roadmaps. The assessment of road-blocks, goals, and project updates were now part of every meeting. Documentation of research and project updates was now critically important, as the group moves forward with senior design projects and eventually, graduation. The Notion platform has only grown in size, a repository of all past and current information for new students to learn from and expand upon. This foundation is available at the fingertips of all interested Wentworth students.
The goal moving into Summer and Fall of 2023 is to prepare our picosatellite for integration and testing. Once testing has completed, it will be integrated with the launch service provider (LSP)’s deployer, and eventually to the launch vehicle itself. From there, we’re only going up.
by Jason Rinehart
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Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA