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This talk's called upset,
the first open source satellite,
so I'll just fall back a little bit
before I was born,
there was a situation where a beep
freaked out half of the world.
And the other half of the world had a big
party.
Today.
You could send that beep from outer
space down to the world.
With upset, an open
source satellite.
Here I give you Pietro's paper
deals with this talk.
Give me a warm, welcome form, please.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Hello, my name is serious
about this, and we're here
to talk about the upset or upset
or upset.
It's going to be a brief history
of the satellite itself, how we got
started, how
you know what our struggle is to create
an open sort of satellite and in the
process of doing so and why we did that
and what do we want to do more
around it than other projects?
The project is a liberal space foundation
project and we are also members of
the Space Foundation.
NSF Liberal Space Foundation is a
nonprofit organization designed to
create open source technologies in space
and includes satellites, what we call
upstream in the space industry,
but also downstream and mainstream
applications. And now we're going to be
having a talk right after hours
here about Sputnik's
from Nikko's, which is the ground station
network that we built with
the Space Foundation.
So how how it all started.
It was 2012,
and Von Karman Institute of Fluid
Dynamics in Belgium
set out to create an audacious project,
which was QB 50
to be 50. The concept is basically this
There is a central institute that is
monitoring the science part of many
satellites, and it's making a
call out to all different academic
institutions and research institutions
universities to create
a satellite around a sensor
and help you along this process,
mainly with securing your loans,
which is super critical and getting a
satellite in space, but
also a bit of guidance around the science
itself because every satellite needs a
reason to be up there and science is
a it isn't good enough, actually.
So
what we started with and what
every project of QB 50 started with
was basically a sensor,
the sensor, the specifics of it
is basically a mental p
multi needle like large probe,
which practically is
used to measure plasma concentrations
from the federal sphere.
That's a part of the atmosphere.
And Von Karman Institute would
like to do some more science around
modeling this part of the atmosphere,
the federal sphere and
the build. Many designed and built many
different sensors around it.
So basically, you you got started with
one of those so early
in 2012, they opened up
applications for different universities
to come in and build satellites around
the sensors.
And the concept was that in Greece,
one of the universities, University of
Patras, initially got accepted
in 2013.
It's 40 years ago to
create one of the satellites, one of the
50 satellites.
And while most, if
not all, cube satellites
went in the way which was pretty
traditional for CubeSats.
And by the way, CubeSats are small
satellites.
It's a form factor, and this
is a form factor that you can see here.
So most of the universities in the
50 program went on the traditional
way of just going out and
buying off the shelf modules
and assembling a satellite.
There is a quite growing market
of commercial in off the shelf components
to buy and create your own satellite.
But this is the costly road
to go down, but it's also the
non exploratory and non innovative
road to go down.
And to their credit, the University of
Padua said, Well,
we're not going to be, you know, buying
components from here and there.
We're going to be designing a satellite
from scratch and building from scratch.
And that's actually quite a
quite a struggle and quite an
adventure to go down
to.
And due to various different
reasons, financial organizational
reasons and reasons within the university
itself, like managerial type of things
that you always have.
They were not really able to progress
with the building of the satellite.
So at some point and that was
late 2015,
like December 2015,
they picked up the phone and
called the Space Foundation, and they
said, well, initially they wanted the
ground station. And then after the ground
station, it came different components
of the satellite itself.
And one thing led to another.
And finally, we were building
the whole satellite from scratch because
most of the research that was done around
the satellite up until that point was not
really usable when
we first got the call about
building of the satellite.
We asked, Well, how much time do
we have?
And they said, well, six months.
And for
those of you that know, like the time
in space project and timeframe,
that space for a project that involved
six months is pretty much nothing
like most of the CubeSats or even, you
know, like really small satellites that
ending up to, you know, very large
satellites take a couple of years,
at least in development and then
verification and then actually getting a
launch in space.
So when they told us six months,
we were like, Yeah, that's
like, Yeah, but let let
let us get back to you on that.
And the fact is that there is
a hard deadline, which is the launch
itself, like there is a rocket waiting
for you or almost like
this and you have to arastoo
to meet those deadlines, right?
And we sat down together with the rest
of the people, especially one day soon,
like the whole team. And we said, well,
we might not be getting a chance to build
the open sort of satellite from scratch
anytime soon.
So yeah, what the hell, let's
let's do it.
So, yeah, started
with a really short timeframe.
What the responsible engineers do is take
if there is anything out there
that we can reuse or take,
you know, knowledge from abstract, some
best practices and how we can really
kick start the effort of creating a
satellite.
So we went into our favorite
site attending and typed in, well,
Open-Source satellite or
documentation about CubeSats or how
do I build a satellite or
more complicated questions like this.
And what we what we found out is
that there were a couple of groups
in the past couple of years that have
tried to do things in
the open, not necessarily open source
in the licensing aspect of things
starting with autostart, which
claimed to be open source, but that for.
And Lee was not at all.
The only thing that was open source was
the part that was executing Arduino code
while in orbit, like none of the hardware
and none of the software underlying the
mission itself.
Then we had the open source satellite
initiative satellite that was never
really operational, plus a
recommendation.
It was not licensed as an open source,
you know, in the typical sense that we've
we've grown accustomed to, like
GPL license or whatever else it is.
And there were like some guidelines about
what you should be careful and what you
should do, but nothing more than that.
And then that group, specifically
U.S.
North America, I'm sorry, is the amateur
satellite groups
that are creating satellites
for amateur radio.
UCITS have
done things in the past and publish them
in various different formats on paper,
in proceedings, in conferences and
congresses.
But that's really far away from open
source. Plus, due to
either regulations, that's
export regulations from U.S.
it was really hard to actually reuse or
even get a hold of those
paper proceedings from conferences, so.
Hmm.
And then a couple of other things like a
Swiss cube, which is example done right
that have published extremely
well documentation about the project
itself, but still the actual schematics
for the hardware or the actual code of
the software was completely missing.
So we said, Well, yeah,
not really like it's nothing,
you know, completely open so that we can
reuse or build upon.
So we started to design everything
from scratch, and we
had to take care of many
mechanical considerations around the
science payload itself.
You can see the science payload on the
left side together for the full four
probes folded on the sides.
And then as you move your way up to a
two units cubesat like this.
So then by 10 centimeters,
by 20 in height,
then you can find the electrical and
power system that's the EPS, then the
attitude, determination and control
that understands what of the satellite is
and how it's positioned and tries to
control that.
Then the onboard computer, which is the
heart of the satellite itself with a
mounting unit,
the i ac
to imagine acquisition component.
Everything in space has to be in fancy
acronyms, although this is just the
camera.
And then the communication
subsystem, the subsystem and the antenna
deployment
structure itself, as you can see here
on the mock up of the satellite.
So starting to do a bit of design
around the satellite itself then went
down into the and kind of in parallel
into the electrical and electronics
side of things.
And this is the main diagram of how the
different components communicate with
each other.
We try to stay as relevant and
as up to the
latest developments around
microcontrollers and best practices
around them as we can be,
which is not typical for the space
industry, like the default for space
industries. If it works, you never change
it. And that's how you end up running,
you know, code that has been written 30
years ago for microcontrollers that were
designed 50 years ago.
So we our main
microcontroller is the M32,
but it's different flavors of it,
depending on the system.
And then you would have the power lines
and all the communications among the
the stamps themselves.
And that's how you end up with a master
plan about how
you know you're going to be building your
satellite.
And then we had to start from something
in terms of the physical format of the
satellite itself.
And as this was developed in our
hackerspace, the first thing that you do
is get the 3D print quickly, something
that you can see, right?
So literally, that was the first week of
development. Like we we had to start from
something and be able to communicate with
that weather that we meant
the z minus side and then
left to the X Y side.
It's much more, you know, he was able to
actually have a a mock up like a model
that you can point to.
And then along the way, we had to
discover a lot of the processes
and reading through the commendations
and trying to figure out the standards
and how, you know, like big satellites
are built.
We designed many things and
discovered them from scratch, starting
from cleanroom procedures or
cleanness procedures
to also, you know how you integrate
and start building things that
have a physical form
in a sense of a satellite.
And gradually, over the course
of, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks
out, many of the things
were starting to be developed much
more.
Efficiently and trying to work each other
as a team like really
in a as paralyzed way as possible,
given the really short timeframe that we
had.
And quickly, one thing led
to another in terms of the design, and we
were able to produce really
fast and intuitive approaches
on the open hardware
side of things like the hardware side of
things.
So we used keycard for
the idea, for the
schematics and the components
themselves and the
boards were designed there and then
free cards to most extend for
the structure itself and some of the
analysis around it.
And, you know, things
moved rather quickly.
And you can see the progress
here within only a month
or probably less in this case,
where on the right side, you can see what
we call engineering model.
So engineering model would be a board
that is not meant to be in space, but
it's meant to be staying here around
your engineers and actually quickly
verifying what you do.
And some of the components
change some of the
manufacturing processes, chains and are
less restrictive than the actual flight
model, which you can see on there or
on the left side.
This is the exact exact same board with
the exact same functionality.
That's the electrical and power system,
the EBS.
And then the satellite started to take
form by itself, and we need to build
and find out how to even build
a carrying case like a case that
we can carry the satellite around
for different testing purposes
or even for doing vibrational tests
and everything else.
And that involved a lot of back and
forth. So we built something and then we
didn't work over the weekend.
We would rebuild it and try to
to make use of the
hyperspace that we we
are operating out of.
That's the hackerspace dockyard in
Athens, Greece, and try to get
access to as much materials
and and tools that we could
that we could in order to progress
as fast as possible.
One of those things was that
during various different phases of the
satellite integration, you actually
need a clean
books like something that is clean enough
in order to assemble your satellite.
So basically, here you can see the clean
books that we designed and built.
We were looking around for different, you
know, best practices around that.
Again, zero open source sort of
recommended designs around around it.
But we would, you know,
like enough to have enough people
to be able to concentrate on that and
create something that was actually
usable.
So the clean books and then
some thermal verifications,
when we first booted up the components
just to make sure that nothing you know
is off the chart, you can
see the power amplified on the comms
platform really heating up there
when it first got
operated and then one critical
component in order to do really
fast paced and
as open as possible procedure of creating
a satellite is to be able to give your
engineers, especially on the software
side of things, give them the ability to
work on the hardware as as fast and
as direct as possible.
So one thing we set out to do was that we
created multiple engineering models that
we distributed to all the core members of
the engineering software engineering team
so that they were able to quickly verify
the code in real time
in real hardware. So you can see here one
of the engineering stocks that was
given to the engineering team,
and while doing that, keeping everything
in the open like we defaulted to open
and publishing everything from scratch
from the day one, we just had the public
repositories and putting code
there and taking everything there,
because one thing that we found out is
that many people say that they're going
to be publishing things along the way and
maybe they do sometime down the
down the road.
But it's completely different in terms
of the mentality that it creates
for the engineers and the teams that are
working together to get everything public
from day zero until
the project is is delivered the
right to visibility.
And it gives a much better history
of the project. So you can see what are
the mistakes were made and and whatnot
in the process of almost completing
the satellite, we had to create the
telecom month and control capability
itself, and that's built on top of sudden
looks. You're going to be hitting about
certain books in the next book.
That's the ground station network that we
have and again trying
to stay as modular as possible
so that other missions can to use
this.
So here are a couple of photos about the
last integration steps of the
satellite in the local hackerspace
space. Here we are on the
vibrational testing team, but
unfortunately, we couldn't build the
vibrational tape they built ourselves,
although they said silence that we should
accept for the next satellite.
And you can see the satellite thing there
in the vibration box
ready to be tested on one of the boxes.
And here is a vacuum chamber
that does the thermal testing.
So basically, you put something in there.
There is vacuum generated inside
the the
box itself, and then there
are thermal cycles that you go through.
So plus 40 degrees Celsius,
minus 20 degrees Celsius.
And that again and again, simulating
as much as you can the space environment.
And we built it also
from scratch as we couldn't have access
to a facility like this.
That's the satellite right after the
thermal vacuum testing.
And then unfortunately, we couldn't build
an ongoing chamber like this because
that's quite huge.
This is a military facility in
Greece that we got access.
Actually, it's demilitarized now, so
that's good.
And we got access to
to do some testing around the
electromagnetic compatibility and the
electromagnetic interference here among
the components.
So this is my knowledge are happy are
defensive near that the audio components
actually worked as predicted,
and those are the final pictures
of the satellite to literally a day
before it was delivered to the
launch coordinator.
That then it can be integrated into the
deployed as we were going to be seeing.
So this is a photo of
the US
basically delivering the satellite to the
big clean room of the integrator.
Those are some final touches on the
satellite itself. One of the science
components have to be integrated
at the end of it, and this is the
official picture of the liberty of the
satellite.
And that happened August 2016.
And from that point, you just wait,
there's nothing you can do. You have
delivered your satellite.
You're just waiting for the other
satellite to come in, get delivered,
be integrated
inside the deployer box,
which is basically an aluminum box with
a spring on one side and then a
door on the other side and that gets in
space. The door opens, spring
pushes the satellites out, and that's the
deployment. There's nothing more fancy
around it. So you can see
you be on the left side and then
barely see the next CubeSat
next to us. That's a French satellite
effort of 04 from
Cuba 50 program also.
So that happened August and September
2016.
And then once everything is integrated,
they have to be exported to us, get
into the
delivery spacecraft,
to the International Space Station.
That was our launch procedure would
we would be delivered to the
International Space Station.
And once we had up there, we would be
deployed from the SS
and we were waiting and waiting.
And for those of you that have been
following space exploration
and space time schedules,
it can be really frustrating like one
thing led to another and there is always
delays on the launches and everything
else. But the magical moment came
and that happened on the 17th
of May 2000 and
2017. So this year, basically.
So we were waiting for almost eight
months basically to
to get to see our our satellite in space.
And once you are in space, then you have
to wait another month in order to be
deployed out of the ice.
And that's the magical moment of
deployment. You can see the people
opening and pushing the three satellites
up outwards.
And the first one would be our satellite
and then to others following following
that.
And you can see the glorious bundles of
solar abundance of Ice S2.
It's a really nice picture.
Thank you.
And then you wait again,
but this time you wait for a short time
and you have to wait for basically 30
minutes. The regulations state that once
you are deployed from ISIS, you have to
shut down everything for 30 minutes and
then start pulling everything
in in operational mode because
you have to be far away enough, far away
from the ISIS itself
in order to not interfere with anything
which is a human rated environment.
Because are astronauts actually in ISIS?
And you wouldn't want to upset that, that
that part.
So we have
the global ground station network.
So we were scheduling busses of the
predicted position of the upset
and rightfully so.
30 minutes after
the satellite we got, we
got word that the satellite was deployed
from the ISIS.
There was one bus off the
Ubisoft above one of our ground stations
in Bloomington, Indiana,
and that was 3:00 a.m.
in the morning from Bloomington.
And we were all actually traveling
to us for a different conference.
And we're anxiously waiting to see if the
upset is alive.
And you can see there in the middle.
I cannot even point to that.
But the room in the middle of the
of the waterfall that you see here, you
can see the CW beacon of the
CubeSat, some
anxious minutes of decoding and trying to
figure out if it's actually our satellite
or someone else because you have multiple
deployments of satellites and then
clearer, more clear passes
come along from the ground station
network. And we can clearly see that this
is us beginning so super
happy times for the team that it actually
worked.
And then we started monitoring the
process and you know how the satellite is
performing, and you can see some of the
initial diagrams that the charging cycles
of the satellite itself.
We're pretty happy that, you know, most
of the components we're actually working
on. Not everything worked
as expected.
And that's, you know, like, unfortunate
to some extent, but really, that's to be
expected and especially, you know, first
timer seen in space missions like us.
And although we could see, you know, most
of the things working really well, one of
the things was really not accounted for
and that was the consumption
of the heating around the battery
component itself.
So we had to hit the batteries in order
to make sure that they're not degraded if
they fall below, you know, zero
degrees Celsius.
But at the same time, the consumption of
those heat that is was actually large
enough that we expected more
thermal insulation than we actually
saw in space.
So we had to overuse that, and right now
we are in the phase that the satellite is
operational.
But at the same time, most of the time is
actually in safe mode in terms of power
itself. So it senses that it's going
below the power that is, you know,
like safe enough to to
use all the different components and
protect itself by cutting down the
various different components.
And then once it started this again, it
begins and says that it's OK
and then same same thing goes
on and on.
That means, unfortunately, we cannot
perform the science mission to do its
entirety.
But still, if we can communicate and
actually have, you know, these beacons
that verifies that many of the things
that we built were designed
correctly.
So what can we learn from that?
That it's really not rocket science?
Well, it is some extent,
but it's really not as hard as people
think it is.
And the critical thing for us would
be to make sure
that no one has has to
go through the same ordeal that we did in
terms of lack of documentation and
lack of open code
or hardware or best practices,
you know, to create the mission for
themselves.
So what we set out to do after
CubeSat was basically
to try to find who
else is interested in an open sort of
satellites.
So we co-organized
an open source CubeSat workshop, the
first of its kind in
the European Space Agency facilities
in Darmstadt, and that happened almost a
month ago, and that was pretty
successful for a first gathering of
people around open source,
especially if you consider that open
source was not really a word here,
then the space industry up
until really recently.
So we would like to extend the goal to
all of you and all of you watching the
ceremony right now that if you have in
mind something which is related to open
open source, it's open source
and it's related to space technologies.
Feel free to reach out.
We are creating a as much diverse
and global community of people,
which we named a little bit of space
community and would like to claim
space the Liberty Way and make sure that
you know no one has to reinvent the wheel
and we can really work on innovative
projects at the edge of the today's
available things in technology.
So. Thank you.
I look forward because this is.
So that was Peter Papyrus.
We still have a little bit of time for
Q&A, if you have questions,
please line up at the mics.
We have four in the whole area.
So just line up and you will be
called up.
We'll just start up with Mike one.
Yeah, you for the interesting,
interesting presentation.
I actually wondered what
you would guess, how long it would
take actually to get some
like Openserve satellites
with inverted vampire transponders
up into low orbit.
Like, you know, we have held such too,
which is going to be up there, hopefully
in 2018, but it's on a commercial
satellite from the Qatar satellite
company and cooperation with Amazon and
so on. But what would you guess like
getting such a transponder
only as an open source project
with no commercial and no secondary
status of actually the project
and and the payload itself?
So that has to come from close
collaboration with the ISF communities
around the world.
I'm aware of phase four ground
and phase four space, which are arms that
backed projects for such specific
technology aspect of the transporter
itself.
Unfortunately, I think that the pace that
this is going on right now is, like,
really slow, so I wouldn't expect
anything within 2018.
As it stands right now, at least.
I'm Mike, to please.
How do you call the electronics in
vacuum?
It's just a radiation enough
to dissipate it, to do some sort of
active cooling as well.
So no active cooling or you have
to rely on radiation and actually
touching of thermal transfer through
actual physical contact between the
different components.
OK, Mike Farr, please.
Hi, thanks so much for the information.
I was wondering about the GPS chips.
As far as I know, consumer available
are locked.
So what did you do about it?
I'm wondering.
Thanks.
Yeah. So that's one of the black spots
of the open source
side of things. And the
concept is that in order to use a dips
in such altitude and such velocity,
you have to have a tip which has
a license to bypass the local
restrictions, which are the restrictions
put in place for four jeeps.
So you have to buy that and this is not
open source and you buy the actual, you
know, Zips receiver
consumer available.
Yeah, although it's pricey like
you can get to a couple of thousand.
Mike one, please.
Hi. So first of all, thanks for
doing the hard work for us.
Um, I think you did some
cost evaluations.
So is there an area any
numbers you can give us?
Yeah. So the total cost for
the hardware of the satellite
amounted around thirty
thousand dollars,
and almost half of it was actually the
solar panels, which we should invest
on creating open source solutions
about, like actually doing that.
And then for the whole project itself,
like together with the engineers that
worked on it and everything else, like, I
would say that the total was around one
hundred and twenty thousand like
together with the launch and everything
like the entirety of the project.
Mike, four,
took two little questions,
the first question can I,
as a random person,
try to communicate with your satellite?
OK, I see.
Yes.
Yes. Then there's the next question
Is this alone enough
to postulate kind of
open source global
satellite to better measure,
like taking, you know,
five form to another level?
Yeah. Although another way
we would be really interesting on talking
with any of anyone who's developing
networks like terrestrial networks right
now on actually how we can move this
to space.
And yes, we're super interested about
that. There's been a couple of ideas, so
feel free to reach out or actually do
reach out, not feel free.
You or anyone else that is interested in
creating networks of satellites.
We actually have a table on
the threshold, guys,
and there's a space foundation table and
there is a ground station. You can find
it for sure.
So, yeah,
I'm Mike to please.
So the CubeSat
ideas are a little
bit older and stuff.
And so what I was wondering, as
it is also like used commercial
lead by like companies like Planet,
we are doing these imaging solutions and
stuff.
Have you had any experience working with
like these startup companies who are also
working with, like basically the same
technology as you are?
And do you think that there's a future
of like maybe like learning from each
other?
Yeah, I think that the the answer
to that lies on the
difference on the business model is
around those initiatives.
And as long as the business model itself
that got in commercial and off the shelf
suppliers of satellite components is
based around actually licensing
the code and well paying for
that license and
paying for getting access to any kind of
recommendation, not even the designs
itself. Like most of the times, you don't
even get to design, even if you pay,
then that's completely different from
our approach in terms of, you know, how
we can create sustainability around that.
I think that there are ways of
collaboration, but really that
has to come through hard work
among each other in order to find the
sweet spots on that.
But for us, you know, not working
in the open is not an option.
So like, that step has to come
to some sense from the other side to.
So I think for three, we don't
have any time anymore.
That was pure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Awesome talk.
The.