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About the mission

EPFL Spacecraft Team is a student association dedicated to bring two 3U CubeSats (100x100x300 mm^3) into earth’s orbit. One of them will be in a 550km circular orbit and the other one will be in an elliptical orbit between 400km and 1000km. Launch is planned for 2023 and the runtime of the mission will be two years.

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Scientific Interest

The most current measurement of earth’s upper layer atmosphere (exosphere) is from the year 1983.

To change this, the UniBern developed a high-end mass spectrometer (see picture) which will be a scientific payload on both of our satellites.

Furthermore a new high-precision GNSS from ETH Zurich will be used to determine the satellites’ position and new solar cells are in-orbit-validated.

On-Board-Computer (OBC)

The OBC is where everything comes together. It’s purpose is to handle communication between the different subsystems. As a main way of processing we use an FPGA with our Ardon SoC hosting a RISC-V soft processor. Furthermore, a PIC microcontroller to reprogram the FPGA in flight is on the board. This microcontroller acts as an external watchdog resetting the soft processor or even the FPGA if needed.

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For storage, we use a f- and sram as well as a SPI flash shared between the PIC and the FPGA.

As this is a rather complex board with 6 layers and quite thin tracks we are happy that Eurocicuits could produce this board for us. We thank them for their technical support and the flawless delivery.

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For more information, please visit our website.

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