Page is managed by: @Laura Diangeli (Teixeira).
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The PROVES Satellites are a 100% open-source mission that provide anybody from anywhere in the world the opportunity to design and fly a payload for to advance both scientific research and community education. However, they remain fundamentally constrained by limited power generation capabilities and have therefore only exist right now in 1U form factors. We would like to expand the mission capabilities of future PROVES generations (and potentially larger form factors like 3Us), primarily by expanding their solar panel footprints.
The development of our own deployable solar array mechanism is driven by the rising costs of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions, which often exceed student club budgets.
To address these challenges, we are conducting research and development of a low-cost, open-source (publicly published) 3U Deployable Solar Array Mechanism specifically designed for university CubeSat applications. Our objective is to create a **reliable**, **reproducible**, and **accessible** deployment system that can significantly power generation while maintaining the cost-effectiveness essential for educational missions.
The mechanism will be designed for integration into 1U or 3U CubeSat platforms and will undergo experimental validation through flight testing aboard a 3U Pleiades satellite series mission. By developing an open-source solution, we aim to democratize access to advanced power systems and enable university teams worldwide to pursue more sophisticated research objectives previously limited by power constraints
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Please read the constraints section before designing.
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Laura is in talks with a start-up from Stanford offering free solar panels in return for establishing space heritage and determining whether they can be used for a new satellite mission that we help work on.
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The team completed its first PDR; the project continues to move forward into more specific and technical details.
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We have found someone to sponsor our peak grant —thank you so much Professor Stefan Kautsch for being willing to support us in this project!
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Please begin by reading this article: https://standards.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/standards/NASA/w/CHANGE-1/1/Historical/nasa-std-5017a.pdf. It is critical for getting you to understand the compliance-based design restrictions on both the EECE and ME end.
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PROVES currently runs with these solar panels: IXOLARTM High Efficiency SolarBIT - 25% solar cell efficiency. $8 per panel - 6 panels per face - 6 faces = $288 per CubeSat, by far their largest expense. Each deployable solar panel in our design is comparable to a CubeSat face, so think about how the expenses add up.
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For power system design and mission planning purposes, a conservative approach to solar power generation estimation is recommended over complex solar beta angle calculations. In this approach, we will assume that that the spacecraft will experience solar illumination for 60% of each orbital period, with the remaining 40% spent in Earth's shadow, corresponding to roughly 57.6 minutes of sunlight and 38.4 minutes of eclipse during a typical 96-minute Low Earth Orbit cycle.
Additionally, the power budget conservatively assumes that only one solar panel face will be optimally oriented toward the Sun at any given time, regardless of the actual spacecraft orientation or the number of available solar surfaces. This approach provides a robust baseline for energy budget calculations on a per-orbit basis.
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Deployable solar panel systems suffer from multiple failure modes in the space environment, including:
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Welcome to the task board for our Deployable Solar Array Project! any project that is not assigned to somebody can be signed up for. Make sure to check the description for prerequisite skills and other useful information and resources. Any project should be completed by the assigned due date if possible. Please try and keep information for each task within the task page itself (click on the task and write research/findings/screenshots in that page)
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Deployable Solar Array Task Board
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