The UNSW-EC0 Cubesat

Attitude Determination and Control (ADC)

The attitude of the cubesat needs to accurately controlled to satisfy experiment requirement. The ADC algorithm for the UNSW EC0 cubesat is developed here at UNSW by the team led by Benjamin Southwell.

Flight Software

The cubesat cannot always maintain radio contact with ground station to operate its subsystems and payloads. For example, the flight software has the intelligence to determine whether to execute an experiment when there is sufficient battery left, or to abort experiment execution and revert to safe mode in low battery situations. This is developed by a team led by John Chung Lam

Assembly and Integration

Individual subsystems of the cubesat are made, modified and assembled for testing at the UNSW ACSER lab.

Hardware-in-the-loop Testing

The cubesat has to undergo multiple development iterations of structural and electrical integration to achieve perfect compatibility between subsystems.

Thermal Vacuum Testing

Space is a very harsh and unforgiving environment, with large temperatures variations and vacuum that can deform structures and hardware. The uNSW-EC0 has undergone 4 days of Thermal-Vacuum Testing that simulates the conditions of space and passed all criteria necessary for it to be proven space-worthy.  

Vibration Testing

Vibration testing of the cubesat emulates the lift-off conditions that the satellite's hardware will have to survive. The UNSW-EC0 cubesat has passed all cubesat vibration standard.