Striving Maiden Mission

Since last May 4th 2018, the deadline for Announcement of Opportunity of Payload Proposal submission for the STRIVING Maiden Mission, the team worked hardly to collect and evaluate the large number of proposal received.

The platform to adopt in this important mission will be the SITAEL S-75 with a 75kg S/C launch mass and 25kg of P/L max mass.

Finally the payload first selection has been defined and on board for the maiden mission will be:

• RUAG: the company aims at testing different satellite systems as GNSS receivers, on Board Computer and Electronics and Radio Occultation components. They are all based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, and will achieve crucial flight heritage on this launch. Applying standard components that are being qualified for space will allow RUAG to be competitive in the new space market delivering high performance instruments at significantly lower cost.
• SITAEL: The Small satellite C-bAnd Transceiver will be able to fulfil communication needs for low orbit small satellites missions in the C-Band portion of the spectrum. The validated SCAT instrument will take into account small platform limitation maintaining both the modularity and scalability features at the basis of its development drivers.
• EICAS: The company aims at validating an innovative multi-camera system for spacecraft autonomous attitude determination based on star tracker. This concept will offer high flexibility, with free number of cameras and free choice of placements in the spacecraft,, robustness, accuracy, scalability and significant cost reduction.
• STELLAR PROJECT: Its instrument, called LaserCube is a laser communication terminal optimized for the integration on CubeSat platforms. LaserCube will provide unprecedented throughput performances both for downlink and inter-satellite link application in a CubeSat standard compliant form.
• SYDERAL: NAVILEO instrument is an autonomous multi-constellation, multi-frequency GNSS receive generating a very precise, real-time, navigation solution. NAVILEO will be based on carefully selected COTS technology in order to build a low cost and high performance instrument.

The complexity of the integration phase is presenting itself in all its magnitude, threatening the initial planning but, the team keeps calm and works hard solving each issue coming up.