Leading the team
I led the group. A mission design project is mostly an exercise in keeping a set of coupled decisions consistent: the orbit drives the power and thermal case, the power budget drives what the payload can do, and what the payload does is the reason the mission exists. Getting the team to converge on one coherent design rather than a stack of individually reasonable subsystems was the real work.
What the project covered
- System architecture, and the allocation of function across subsystems
- Orbital considerations and how they constrain the rest of the design
- Mission operations, from launch through the operational phase
- A complete written proposal carrying the design and its justification
The CubeSat form factor is the useful constraint. Volume, mass and power are fixed before you begin, so every design choice has to be paid for out of a budget that does not move, and a proposal that ignores that is not a proposal.
Outcome
The project delivered a complete mission plan and proposal, and was awarded a first.
