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Space missions are characterized by long distances, difficult or unavailable communication and high operating costs. Moreover, complexity has been constantly increasing in recent years. For this reason, improving the autonomy of space…
CubeSats are tiny satellites with increasing capabilities. They have been used for more than a decade by universities to train students on space technologies, in a hands-on project aiming at building, launching and operating a real…
CubeSats are small satellites built in standard sizes and form factors, which have been growing in popularity but have thus far been largely ignored within the field of astronomy. When deployed as space-based telescopes, they enable science…
It is the responsibility of today's scientists, engineers, and educators to inspire and encourage our youth into technical careers that benefit our society. Too often, however, this responsibility is buried beneath daily job demands and the…
Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…
Challenging space missions include those at very low altitudes, where the atmosphere is source of aerodynamic drag on the spacecraft that finally defines the missions lifetime unless way to compensate for it is provided. This environment is…
Science reproducibility is a cornerstone feature in scientific workflows. In most cases, this has been implemented as a way to exactly reproduce the computational steps taken to reach the final results. While these steps are often…
We present a publicly-available toolkit of flight-proven hardware and software to retrieve 5 TB of data or small physical samples from a stratospheric balloon platform. Before launch, a capsule is attached to the balloon, and rises with it.…
Capstone projects are widely adopted by universities around the world as a culminating assessment in bachelor's degree programs. These projects typically involve student teams tackling complex, real-world problems proposed by external…
We describe the development and implementation of a light-weight, fully autonomous 2-axis pointing and stabilization system designed for balloon-borne astronomical payloads. The system is developed using off-the-shelf components such as…
Successful implementation of active learning strategies in the engineering classroom -- and in particular in certain subjects which are highly technological in nature such as, for instance, rocket engines and space propulsion -- means…
Laser-accelerated lightsails enable new types of missions that are very different from the Breakthrough Starshot mission to the Centauri system that aims to send 1 gram of payload at 0.2 c. The present work widens the mission design space…
With interstellar mission concepts now being under study by various space agencies and institutions, a feasible and worthy interstellar precursor mission concept will be key to the success of the long shot. Here we investigate…
An approach towards wireless ranging and synchronization using commercial of-the-shelf software-defined radio payloads for small satellites, esp. CubeSats is studied. The approach only relies on the programmable logic configuration and…
The Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal (SpIRIT) 6U CubeSat is a mission led by The University of Melbourne in cooperation with the Italian Space Agency. Launched in a 510 km Polar Sun Synchronous Orbit in December 2023, SpIRIT…
Rosetta is a science platform for resource-intensive, interactive data analysis which runs user tasks as software containers. It is built on top of a novel architecture based on framing user tasks as microservices - independent and…
We present here a low-cost Raspberry Pi (RPi)-based star sensor StarberrySense using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, developed and built for applications in small satellites and CubeSat-based missions. A star sensor is one of…
The modern engineering landscape increasingly requires a range of skills to successfully integrate complex systems. Project-based learning is used to help students build professional skills. However, it is typically applied to small teams…
Recent miniaturization of electronics in very small, low-cost and low-power configurations suitable for use in spacecraft have inspired innovative small-scale satellite concepts, such as ChipSats, centimeter-scale satellites with a mass of…
We discuss a possibility to survey many Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) with a single launch using a few smallscale spacecraft, each equipped with solar sails, which could be unfurled from a single interplanetary bus at the perihelion of that…