EUROPE’S LARGEST SMALLSAT CONFERENCE

JUne 1-3, 2027 | RAI, Amsterdam

Paper Category: Technology

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • MediSat: A Secure Delay-Tolerant CubeSat Constellation for Medical Data Relay in Infrastructure-Degraded Environments

    Reliable transmission of medical data during disasters and in remote regions remains a critical challenge due to damaged, congested, or nonexistent terrestrial communication infrastructure. This paper presents MediSat, a SmallSat-based system concept for secure, delay-tolerant relay of medical data using a constellation of CubeSats operating in low Earth orbit. The proposed architecture employs a store-and-forward…

  • Optimisation of star tracker orientation and attitude trajectories for space-to-ground optical communication on CubeSats

    Optical communication systems promise a step-change in data return capability for CubeSats but introduce exceptionally demanding pointing requirements. In some cases, sub-milliradian level pointing of the satellite is required to successfully acquire a laser signal from the ground. This is further complicated by the relatively high angular velocities and angular accelerations of the satellite-to-ground target…

  • Making Satellite Infrastructure Trustworthy with TCG Standards

    As small satellite missions mature and scale, cybersecurity and digital trust are increasingly critical across spacecraft, ground systems, and supply chains. Trusted computing, long established in other critical infrastructure sectors, remains relatively unfamiliar within the satellite community but is gaining momentum through the growing adoption and evolution of Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs). This trend reflects…

  • Quantized AI Inference on Constrained Embedded Platforms for Small-Satellite Settings

    In resource-constrained small-satellite settings, AI inference must operate under tight size, power, and payload budgets, which tend to limit onboard compute capability and data handling. These conditions motivate establishing a clear baseline for quantized AI inference under bounded compute and memory resources. To instantiate this baseline, a representative embedded-vision neural-network workload serves as the reference…

  • In-Orbit Experimental Validation of Autonomous Operations within the AIX Satellite-as-a-Service Framework

    As Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations continue to scale, traditional ground-centric operational paradigms struggle to meet increasing demands in latency, flexibility, and operational cost. The AIX (AI-eXpress) mission series addresses these limitations by introducing a service-oriented satellite architecture that enables dynamic in-orbit resource usage and application deployment. This paper presents the in-orbit experimental activities of…

  • SPOCK: Enabling Cognitive Cloud Computing in Space for Low Latency Earth Observation

    The SPOCK (Smart Processing Orbital Cloud Konstellation) initiative introduces novel constellation architecture concepts designed to enable Cognitive Cloud Computing in Space (3CS) capabilities addressing the growing demand for low-latency and high-performance data processing in Earth Observation (EO) missions. The project is currently being carried out by Indra and Aresys under ESA funding and follows up…