Integration and Testing Campaign of an Educational Satellite Ground Station

In the last decade, the number of educational CubeSats launched into orbit has increased significantly, due to their simplicity and the lowering of launch costs. While building and launching a CubeSat is relatively common across universities around the world, the ability to directly manage the operations is still not widely spread. The main obstacle is the availability of a ground segment for the student teams. The CubeSat Team Polito, based in the Politecnico di Torino, has addressed this issue by starting the design of its own ground station in 2018. The CubeSat Control Centre (C3) will be the primary satellite communication infrastructure of Politecnico di Torino and will allow the students to manage end-to-end space missions, from the very beginning of the mission definition to the end of operations. C3 consists of all the necessary for communicating with satellites in radio amateurs’ bands in VHF, UHF, S and X Band, to be used by personnel with basic knowledge, comprising of Commercial Off-The-Shelf components. This paper reports the design status and discusses the AIV (Assembly, Integration and Validation) plan and activities. It regards not only the technical aspect of the integration and validation tests, but also the organization of the testing team. The testing campaign has the main objective of successfully integrating all the hardware and software components into a functional and operative ground station. The testing campaign starts with the RX and antenna array subsystems. The first activity is testing the single components with the use of Software Defined Radios, oscilloscopes, and a signal generator to produce synthetic noise. As the tests are successful, more components are integrated with the test object reaching the final subsystem configuration correctly integrated. Observations are taken concerning the presence of powerful RF sources in the nearby C3 that can cause interference and loss of valuable data. This testing structure will be used for all the testing needed, mostly regarding the RF Front End and remote connection to the system through internet protocols as well as the tracking system. The testing campaign itself has an incredible educational value, as it is an opportunity for the team members to learn how to integrate and validate subsystems and it allows the students to develop teamwork skills and laboratory instrumentation usage skills. Best practices on how to manage a similar test campaign and on how to engage students in such activities are provided.