Paper Category: Engineering
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LEONSEGS: Ground Segment as a Service and Cross Mission Planning for SmallSat Operations
This presentation provides a concise technical briefing with a short demo of the Large Earth Observation New Space Ecosystem Ground Segment (LEONSEGS) project to solicit constructive peer feedback and engage potential adopters. LEONSEGS is a federated ground segment platform that combines Ground Segment as a Service with multi mission planning and semantic archive retrieval to…
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Ensuring Orbital Safety from T-0: The Critical Imperative for Immediate Post-Launch Collision Avoidance
As the density of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environment increases, driven by frequent rideshare missions and the deployment of mega-constellations, the initial phase of satellite operations has emerged as a period of heightened orbital risk. Historically, collision avoidance (COLA) processes have relied on established tracking by Space Situational Awareness (SSA) providers. However, this study…
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Component-Level Polymer Composite Spot Shielding for Radiation and Thermal Management in SmallSats
The increasing use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics in SmallSat platforms offers significant advantages in cost, performance, and development speed; however, radiation tolerance and thermal constraints often force conservative spacecraft-level shielding strategies. Bulk aluminum enclosures introduce substantial size, weight, and power (SWaP) penalties and frequently require entire subsystems to be over-shielded based on the most radiation-sensitive…
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RF Interference Mitigation for Dual S-Band Links on a 6U CubeSat: Preliminary Hardware Validation
This paper presents the RF communication system architecture and preliminary hardware validation for the ALIGN (Autonomous Laser-based Inter-satellite Gigabit Network) mission, comprising a pair of 6U CubeSats equipped with FOCUS (Free-space Optical Communications Unit for Space), an experimental payload demonstrating high-data-rate optical inter-satellite links in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Each platform features co-located S-band Radio…
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Enabling Secure Maritime Connectivity: MAIV of the MICE-1 CubeSat Mission
The increasing reliance of Maritime IoT and Internet of Vessels (IoV) applications on satellite connectivity places stringent requirements not only on system architecture and communications performance, but also on the robustness, manufacturability, and verification of spaceborne platforms operating in demanding environments. In this context, nanosatellite missions targeting maritime services must balance tight mass, volume, and…
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Securing Small Satellites: Integrating Cybersecurity into CubeSat Architecture through MBSE
The growing use of CubeSats across industry and student-led university projects has expanded the cyber threat surface of space systems, making cybersecurity a critical design consideration. Historically, satellites were expensive, state-owned assets, limiting access to space and reducing the number of potential threat actors. Today, CubeSats offer a low-cost, widely deployable alternative, enabling broader participation…
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An FPGA-SoC Camera Payload Processing Unit with Soft-GPU Acceleration for Onboard Vision
This paper presents an FPGA-SoC-based camera payload processing unit for onboard vision on resource-constrained spacecraft platforms. The system combines Engineering Minds Munich’s Smart Power and Processing Module (SPPM), a remote camera interface based on MIPI-CSI-2, and a GPU-accelerated embedded processing chain using a soft-GPU concept. The architecture is intended for image-based monitoring and recognition tasks…
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Air-Bearing-Based Evaluation of Reaction Wheel Micro-Vibrations and Their Impact on Small Satellite Pointing Stability
High-performance imaging satellite missions require exceptional pointing stability to ensure image quality and geometric fidelity. This stability is often degraded by micro-vibrations originating from reaction wheels, which propagate through the spacecraft structure and induce line-of-sight (LoS) jitter. Although force-torque measurements are commonly used to characterise these disturbances at component level, relating them to spacecraft-level pointing…
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Semi-Autonomous Reconnaissance Satellite: A Laboratory Demonstration of End-to-End On-Board Mission Autonomy
Real-time satellite responsiveness to user requests from the field remains largely unavailable in current space systems. Such capabilities are typically restricted to low-altitude airborne platforms, primarily due to limited satellite communication bandwidth, intermittent ground contact, and the reliance on ground-based mission planning. Enabling true responsiveness requires a paradigm shift toward highly autonomous satellites, in which…
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Dynamic Response of CubeSat Structures Under Launch Loads: Effects of Internal Mass Distribution
During launch, CubeSats are subjected to severe loads, and the internal mass distribution within their structures can significantly affect their dynamic response and overall structural behavior. An investigation of the structural and dynamic behavior of a CubeSat in representative launch environments, with particular emphasis on internal mass distribution, is crucial to the design and development…