Tyvak October 2017

Participants: Marco Villa - Background from Uni Kansas. Started a CubeSat project there. Currently little activities there, since the uni did not transform from project to program. 

Mariusz, Roger

Marco showed us their lab, where they build, integrate and test their CubeSats. Assembly on Flow Benches; which is an open, but air-flushed lab bench that gives near-cleenroom working surface. More than sufficient for most satellites, at least if they do not have any optics. 
They do their own design of PCBs, but assembly is outsourced. Are however making changes, fixes, replacing circuits and so on in-house. 
Well developed process and information/documentation sharing via online systems, for each customer

Using flat-sats as a common platform during integration. The flatsat can be at Tyvak; customer has remote access, or the other way around. 

T-vac and temperature cycling is performed several times during test and assembly. Shaking is performed at other locations. 

Marco is COO for the US branch and CEO in Italy. Worked with SpaceX for several years. Worked with Dragon as a flight director for reentry. Also worked with smallsats on the East-coast. Experience in leading from 100 to 4000 persons...

Mission for US-army for comms. with low gain unattended sensors (100-1000 sensors/pass). Could have UAV dropping sensors into areas, and then communicate with that. 

Have backup, use UHF and more compressed data. 

Power for bus: 12 W or so. Low power design is important. 

5 W is fine for 3 U. 10 W for 6 U. Peak power is not a problem. 

Payload and power on for a short time can be better than sequencing. 

Thermal planning can be bigger issue than the power budget when having long duty cycles. 

Don't do too much working on budgets. The numbers will change when we get in contact with the provider. They will have to do their own calculations for other optimentation in order to make the best bus. 

Move everything to CDR up to right after newyear. Need the most time for integration. Must be 40/60 at least for planning/integration. Get hardware as fast as possible. 

Payload is good enogh already. If things change 10-20% from now, does not matter. Start working. 

Tyvak has no such revies. Have Feasability review (is it possible). Do ha short design phase. If short is not right; engineers are bad, or the feasibility is bad. 

Integration: Get the flat-sat on the bench as soon as possible. 

Important: What is the level of quality of the image to meet the minimum mission. 

Do sensitivity analysis on main drivers. Is it SNR or something else. 

Study dutycycle further (ConOps)

Would challenge us on everything on level-2 reqs. Because that depends on the bus. 

Can be potential for cooperation with Italy also. 

Tyvak has not flown HSI yet. Did not have a good mission --> didnt want to do it. 

This mission is evaluated as a better case. 

Flight candidate on SpaceNorways satellite?? 

Minimum amount of time of operation is so small that a separate satellite might not be required. 

SDR: Dont want SDR in the bus. As a payload, SDR is fine 😃

Configurable bus: Not really want to give access to ADCS. Its designed to do it, but have not done it yet. 

If you start playing with parameters with Kalman-filter and so on, you have dis-valuated all mission planning so-far. 

Find sizes for FPGA-images. Do we need S-band receiver?

Level of access to software: 

Only binaries + config-files. 

Payload interface board: Will have a own processor. Low levels (interface to the rest). We dont get a ICD for the bus, but the ICD on processor. 

Have a full fault and tolerance matrix. High level of (FTDIR) supervision and control. Has a "envelope of flight". Does not want customers to destroy the bus. 

Is a user centric company. The satellelite is a tool to fullfill the project of the customer.