Sang-Young Park

The authors have made the following corrections to the author list and the content of the original publication

CubeSat programs are often conducted under severe constraints in budget, personnel, schedule, and knowledge continuity, while still requiring sufficient verification to support mission success. This paper presents the verification, testing, on-orbit operation, and anomaly analysis of COSMIC, a 3U CubeSat jointly developed by Yonsei University, Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL), and UZURO Tech Inc. in less than eleven months from project kickoff to launch. COSMIC adopted a protoflight model approach, prioritized commercial off-the-shelf components with flight heritage and prior laboratory experience, and concentrated limited resources on subsystem, FlatSat, system-level, environmental, communication, and scenario-based testing. The test program is reviewed against the subsequent on-orbit results to identify which verification activities contributed to anomaly prevention, fault isolation, and recovery. The results show that system-level integration testing, thermal vacuum cycle testing, and scenario testing were particularly effective in revealing interface, software, and deployment-related issues before launch and in supporting early orbit recovery. However, the mission also exposed limitations in recovery-logic verification, long-duration software testing, communication robustness, and independent reset paths. Based on these findings, practical recommendations are derived for resource-constrained CubeSat teams seeking to tailor verification activities without simply reducing test rigor.

CubeSats operating under nadir-pointing or mission-priority attitude conditions often experience unfavorable solar incidence on their solar panels, limiting available onboard power. This study proposes a thermally driven passive sun-pointing mechanism for CubeSat solar panels and evaluates its prototype-level feasibility. The mechanism uses a photothermal panel, heat pipe, heat cartridge, shape memory alloy (SMA) spring, and universal joint to convert external thermal input into panel tilting motion without direct electrical actuation. A prototype was evaluated through SMA spring actuation tests, single-module pointing experiments, four-direction pointing tests, orbital thermal analysis, and expected annual energy-generation analysis. The experiments showed thermally induced contraction and recovery tendency of the two-way SMA spring and demonstrated that selective thermal input can generate directional tilting and return motion in a four-direction prototype. Orbital thermal analysis indicated that heat can be transferred to the actuation region while maintaining directional thermal separation. The energy-generation analysis suggested that limited-angle pointing can improve annual energy generation compared with a fixed flat panel. These results support the prototype-level feasibility of the proposed mechanism, although further multi-axis measurement, long-term cycling, and thermal-vacuum validation are required.

As the demand for high-speed space-borne data transmission grows, CubeSat-based Free-Space Optical Communication (FSOC) offers a viable solution for achieving a Gbps-speed optical intersatellite link on low-cost platforms. The Very-High-Speed Intersatellite Optical Link System Using an Infrared Optical Terminal and Nanosatellite (VISION) mission aims to establish these high-speed laser crosslinks, which require a precise pointing and relative positioning system at relative distances up to 1000 km. A real-time relative navigation system was developed based on dual-frequency GPS pseudorange and carrier-phase measurements, incorporating an adaptive Kalman filter which uses innovation-based covariance matching to dynamically adjust process noise covariance. Hardware-integrated testing with GPS signal generators and onboard receivers validated its performance under realistic conditions, consistently achieving sub-meter positioning accuracy across baselines up to 1000 km. An integrated orbit–attitude simulation further evaluated the feasibility of the Pointing, Acquisition, and Tracking (PAT) system by combining real-time relative navigation outputs with an attitude control system. Simulation results showed that the PAT system maintained a total pointing error of 274.3 μrad, sufficient to sustain stable high-speed optical links. This study demonstrates that the VISION relative navigation and pointing systems, integrated within the PAT framework, enable precise real-time optical intersatellite communication using CubeSats.

A satellite laser ranging (SLR) system uses lasers to measure the range from ground stations to space objects with millimeter-level precision. Recent advances in SLR systems have increased their use in space surveillance and tracking (SST). The problem we are addressing, the precise orbit determination (POD) using one-dimensional range observations within a single arc, is challenging owing to infinite solutions because of limited observability. Therefore, general orbit determination algorithms struggle to achieve reasonable accuracy. The proposed algorithm redefines the cost value for orbit determination by leveraging residual tendencies in the POD process. The tendencies of residuals are quantified as R-squared values using Fourier series fitting to determine velocity vector information. The algorithm corrects velocity vector errors through the grid search method and least squares (LS) with a priori information. This approach corrects all six dimensions of the state vectors, comprising position and velocity vectors, utilizing only one dimension of the range observations. Simulations of three satellites using real data validate the algorithm. In all cases, the errors of the two-line element data (three-dimensional position error of 1 km and velocity error of 1 m/s, approximately) used as the initial values were reduced by tens of meters and the cm/s level, respectively. The algorithm outperformed the general POD algorithm using only the LS method, which does not effectively reduce errors. This study offers a more efficient and accurate orbit determination method, which improves the safety, cost efficiency, and effectiveness of space operations.

This study developed a real-time spacecraft pose estimation algorithm that combined a deep learning model and the least-squares method. Pose estimation in space is crucial for automatic rendezvous docking and inter-spacecraft communication. Owing to the difficulty in training deep learning models in space, we showed that actual experimental results could be predicted through software simulations on the ground. We integrated deep learning with nonlinear least squares (NLS) to predict the pose from a single spacecraft image in real time. We constructed a virtual environment capable of mass-producing synthetic images to train a deep learning model. This study proposed a method for training a deep learning model using pure synthetic images. Further, a visual-based real-time estimation system suitable for use in a flight testbed was constructed. Consequently, it was verified that the hardware experimental results could be predicted from software simulations with the same environment and relative distance. This study showed that a deep learning model trained using only synthetic images can be sufficiently applied to real images. Thus, this study proposed a real-time pose estimation software for automatic docking and demonstrated that the method constructed with only synthetic data was applicable in space.

CANYVAL-C is a formation-flying mission that demonstrates a coronagraph utilizing two CubeSats. The coronagraph is a space telescope that blocks sunlight to examine the overcast regions around the sun. It is composed of optical and occult segments. Two spacecraft were aligned with respect to an inertial system to configure a virtual telescope using inertial alignment hold technology. The relative orbit control scenario for this mission involves rendezvous, differential air drag control, and inertial alignment holding. Orbit control algorithms and simple strategies that can be automatically constructed onboard have also been developed. For each maneuver, the control performance under the errors from navigation, attitude determination and control, and propulsion systems were assessed via Monte Carlo simulation, taking into account the hardware specifications and operations. In addition to the algorithm and strategy of this mission, the relative orbit control scenario was evaluated for its practicability using Monte Carlo simulations. The feasibility of this mission is ensured by a statistical analysis of the prospect of its success during its operation.

In this study, a novel impulsive trajectory optimization algorithm for near-fuel-optimal rendezvous under perturbations is presented. The algorithm, called algorithm for impulsive rendezvous trajectory optimization under perturbations (AIRTOP), is designed such that the accuracy of rendezvous constraints is improved as much as possible while retaining the first-order optimality, under high-fidelity dynamics models that encompass various orbital perturbations (e.g., nonspherical gravity, air drag, luni-solar gravity, and solar radiation pressure). To eliminate rendezvous constraint errors, AIRTOP solves the linearized impulsive rendezvous problem recursively using the nonsingular dual-primal optimization algorithm. To improve the computational efficiency, AIRTOP applies the approximate analytical gradient of the constraint error norm during its error elimination process. We present three numerical simulations near circular and elliptical orbits. The simulation results show that i) AIRTOP can successfully solve impulsive rendezvous problems under realistic orbital perturbations with minimal user intervention, and ii) it can generate more fuel-efficient solutions in similar or shorter computation time than two other methods, namely, the differential corrector of the General Mission Analysis Tool and the global optimization approach, which can also take complex perturbations into account.