Mason A. Peck

Within the past decade, the aerospace engineering industry has evolved outside the constraints of using single, large, custom satellites. Due to increased reliability and robustness of commercial off the shelf (COTS) printed circuit board (PCB) components, missions instead have transitioned towards deploying swarms of smaller satellites. This approach significantly decreases the mission cost by reducing custom engineering and deployment expenses. Nanosatellites are able to be quickly developed with a more modular design at lowered risk. The Alpha mission at Cornell Space Systems Studio is fabricated in this manner. However, for the purpose of this mission, only one satellite was initially developed. This manuscript will discuss a systems engineering approach to the development of this satellite. As a disclaimer, this manuscript is written from a systems perspective. Therefore it will follow many subsystems from a wide range of functionalities. The research in this manuscript was kept broad with the hope to contribute to the mission as a system, through a range of development phases including validation and verification of existing methods. The two systems that will be primarily focused on are the Attitude Control System (ACS) of the carrier nanosatellite (cubesat), and the RF communications on the ex-creted picosatellites (chipsat). Milestones achieved in chipsat RF include chipsat to chipsat communication, chipsat to SDR ground station communication, packet creation, error correction, appending a preamble, and filtering the signal. Achievements on the ACS side included controller traceability/verification and validation, software rigidity tests, hardware endurance testing, Kane damper and IMU tuning. These developments matured the technological readiness level (TRL) of our systems in preparation for satellite deployment.

Neural networks have become state-of-the-art computer vision tools for tasks that learn implicit representations of geometrical scenes. This paper proposes a two-part network architecture that exploits a view-synthesis network to understand a context scene and a graph convolutional network to generate a shape body model of an object within the field of view of a spacecraft’s optical navigation sensors. Once the first part of the network’s architecture understands the spacecraft’s environment, it can generate images from novel observations. The second part uses a multiview set of images to construct a 3D graph-based representation of the object. The proposed network pipeline produces shape models with accuracies that compete with state-of-the-art methods currently used for missions to small bodies. The network pipeline can be trained for multi-environment missions. Moreover, the onboard implementation may be more cost-effective than the current state-of-the-art.

This paper develops a general method to execute orbital rendezvous in continuation of previous work, where a spacecraft’s orbit was represented using the angular momentum and eccentricity vectors o...

This work maps the magnetic field within a type-II superconductor of finite dimension that is magnetically flux-pinned. The measured field is lower in magnitude than anticipated from the frozen image model and changes shape dependent on the field-cooled image location. A proposed refined model more accurately reflects the measured field.

Flux-pinned interfaces maintain a passively stable equilibrium between two spacecraft in close proximity. Although flux-pinning physics has been studied from a materials science perspective and at ...