Just how harsh is the space environment into which you thrust your DIY satellite? We look at what conditions your satellite must endure, how to test your satellite, and what launch, ground and orbit support you will need. In addition, we provide tips on making your overall plan and schedule, including the most important tests that will help your satellite survive and thrive in space.
Chapter 1 gives you a quick primer on what space and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) actually is, while Chapter 2 goes deeper with actual numbers that describe the conditions your satellite will be facing in space. Having set the scope of what space conditions are, Chapter 3 goes into more into detail about the radiation environment you’ll be facing in the ionosphere and how to mitigate its risks. Chapter 4 provides you with a discussion of what testing is all about as well as offering some sample NASA CubeSat requirements and a smidgen of formal systems engineering.
In Chapter 5, we get into building a thermal vacuum chamber for mimicking the space environment. Chapter 6 walks you through building and running a vibration shake test to mimic the difficulties of your anticipated rocket launch. Chapter 7 guides you through high G-force testing of your payload using a homebuilt centrifuge.
Chapter 8 closes the book with a discussion on the usefulness of flight spares, guidelines on scheduling your tests, and help in choosing appropriate clean room or lab in which to test. In summary, the book tells you where your satellite is heading, what to test, and how and where to test it. We hope this book also serves you as a basic text on the Low Earth Orbit environment in general, so that you can design, build and test a spaceworthy picocraft.
By the end of this book, you will be ready to prove your picosatellite has the right stuff to deploy via a fiery rocket launch into the harsh vacuum of space. We also recommend the other books in this series: our primer on designing and building your craft in DIY Satellite Platforms, crafting your mission’s science and technical goals in DIY Instruments for Amateur Space, and commanding, operating and downloading data from your satellite in DIY Data Communications for Amateur Spacecraft.
But first, let’s really test the limits of the picosatellite you’ve built.
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