CubeSat Control Centre: A development of an educational control centre to support CubeSat space operations

CubeSats are becoming an important reality in space exploration both in academia and industry. The increasing capabilities of this kind of system enable new kind of missions able to fulfill more diverse mission goals. Despite their reduced complexity, spacecraft operations do not scale down with the size. Hence, training future spacecraft operators via CubeSat operations would be an important method to increase the effectiveness of future operations with already trained experts. To tackle these issues, the thesis presents Cubesat Control Centre (C3) is an innovative ground segment to support Cubesat Operations directly from Politecnico di Torino. It is composed by a ground station and a control centre operated by students and non-professional operators. Control Centre's software for the unpacking of telemetries data and the scheduling of operations are implemented by Python. The aim of this software is to provide an interface that can read automatically telemetries data and using scheduled protocols for sending telecommands. The process is monitored by several consistency checks which identify the correct acquisition of the package, identify the type of package, extract the data and convert them into an engineering language. The main component of this process is a database that helps software and consistency checks to perform their tasks. The operator can see an interface where the following are displayed: type of arriving packet, check of correct acquisition and validation of packets, binary code from satellite, engineering value of arriving data. From the interface the operator can also select the mission protocols to use for the mission, can simulate the command to send and sends command directly to satellite when it is in visibility. C3 is one of the one of the first academic control centres in Italy using the ESA CCSDS's standards and it is a useful facility for educational and research purposes. Control Centre is divided into three areas: Flight Operation: Where CubeSats receives telecommands, sends telemetries and where the team evaluate follow up operations; Payload Data Ground Segment: where the management of payload data happens; User Segment: where consumer could request a series of products by means of a formal request. By providing to primary mission fast delivery information and high-quality data, sending scheduled commands and assisting in managing requests from stakeholders, C3's control centre is a valid resource and cheap support for operation, enabling great learning opportunities and effacement operations with an open source vison to support CubeSat community.