OpenOrbiter: A Low-Cost, Educational Prototype CubeSat Mission Architecture

Abstract

The preliminary design for the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) demonstration spacecraft, OpenOrbiter, is presented. OPEN is designed to facilitate the formation of CubeSat development programs nationally and worldwide via providing a publically-available set of spacecraft design documents, implementation and testing plans. These documents should allow the creation of a 1-U CubeSat with a parts budget of approximately $ 5,000. This allows spacecraft development to be incorporated in regular curriculum and supported from teaching (as opposed to research) funds. The OPEN design, implemented by OpenOrbiter, has an innovative internal structure, separates payload and operations processing and includes features to ease and highlight errors in integration.

Keywords

• small spacecraft
• CubeSat
• educational NanoSat
• open hardware designs
• open source software
• mission design