CSIROSat-1 mission - CDR and Early Subsystems Testing

CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Australia)) has been working on the design aspects of its first CubeSat mission, known as CSIROSat-1, together with Inovor Technologies (an Australian space start-up company). The 3U CubeSat will comprise a hyperspectral payload imager, composed of a SWIR camera, lens and a filter, together with an on-board processing board and will be launched into a LEO orbit from the ISS in the northern summer of 2020.

With PDR completed in late November 2018, all focus is now on early integration tasks and the CDR to be completed by early June 2019. The results of the CDR and an early sub-system test program will be presented, highlighting lessons learned to date as well as the plan ahead to complete our test program, which will involve vibration testing, TVAC and day-in-the-life testing as well as repeated testing of our deployable structures such as antennas and solar panels.

An ambitious in-orbit re-programmable high performance on-board processor will form part of our mission and will be coupled with post-processing imaging capabilities on the ground to learn from the key parameters that require tweaking to maximise the quality of the data products. The optimised parameters will then be incorporated into a new FPGA image that will be uploaded to CSIROSat-1 as the mission progresses.