3-STAR program at Politecnico di Torino

The 3-st@r program is the new CubeSat educational project being carried on at Politecnico di Torino. It comes in response to the GENSO Experimental Orbital Initial Demonstration (GEOID) mission call for proposals issued by the ESA Education Office. GEOID is expected to be the communication backbone of the initial version of an international satellite constellation system,HumSAT, which will act as communication support for areas without infrastructures or for developing countries. The 3-st@r satellite will be a 3U CubeSats in the GEOID constellation. It will be orbiting the Earth and acting as a data-relay platform and a space-based testbed for an Earth remote sensing experiment. This satellite will be composed by three parts: the spacecraft bus module; the HumSAT payload, consisting of a simple but extremely reliable communication module that meets HumSAT requirements and the P-GRESSION (Payload for GNSS REmote Sensing and SIgnal detectiON) experiment, whose main goal is to achieve measurements by means of radio-occultation techniques and scattering theory, using GNSS signals. This paper describes the 3-st@r on board system architectures, the trade off between the various requirements, the main design features, the budgets and solutions adopted for each subsystem and components and some innovative choices are underlined.