CUBESAT TEAM OF POLITECNICO DI TORINO: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE PROJECTS

The CubeSat Team is a student team of Politecnico di Torino involved in the design and development of small platforms for scientific space missions and for testing new technologies in orbit. The team was created in 2008 on the initiative of students and professors of the Aerospace Engineering course. More than 150 students got involved in the program since then. The CubeSat Team is coordinated by the Systems and Technologies for Aerospace Research team of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, under the supervision of Professor Sabrina Corpino. The objectives of the program are summarised in the following mission statement: “To educate aerospace-engineering students on systems development, management, and team work. To achieve insight in the development of scenarios and enabling technologies for future space missions” In these years, the CubeSat Team reached great achievements, above all the launch of the e-st@r-I spacecraft, one of the two first Italian CubeSats in orbit. Students got involved in the design, development, and verification effort and participated actively in the integration and launch campaign. At the moment, two other CubeSats are being developed at the Systems and Technologies for Aerospace Research laboratory (STARLab): e-st@r-II, and 3-STAR, which are respectively part of the ESA “Fly Your Satellite!” and GEOID programs. The primary scientific payload of e-st@r-II is an active Attitude Determination and Control System for which innovative determination algorithms have been developed. The CubeSat successfully completed the environmental test campaign on June 2015 at ESA-ESTEC. 3-STAR is a 3U CubeSat that will take part in the GEOID constellation for the validation of the GENSO network through the HumSat communication payload. In addition, 3-STAR carries a remote sensing GNSS-based payload. This experiment will open the door to several applications, from Earth monitoring to civil protection warning services, and eventually military missions. The team is also working on the definition of new mission concepts to define innovative solutions targeted to establish low-cost/fast-delivery space assets for science and exploration of the Solar system. The aim of these missions is to increase the scientific and technological knowledge with unprecedented measurements and by exploiting the potentialities of interplanetary CubeSats as distributed systems. At the present moment, two main destinations are considered: Mars and Near Earth Asteroids. For these studies, two important international collaborations have been established, with MIT and NASA’s JPL. All these activities will be described into the details in the paper.