Advanced miniaturised sensors for commercial and scientific nanosatellite missions

Nano-satellites, particularly in the CubeSat form factor, have attracted a lot of interest worldwide. With their rapid turn-around and low cost, they lend themselves particularly well to education. However, exploiting advances in miniaturisation, nanosatellites are increasingly being employed in commercial and scientific arenas. In some domains internationally competitive science can also be performed and several current CubeSat missions are targeted at science applications, especially at studies that can be carried out at Low-Earth Orbits or through piggy-back opportunities. A particular area that benefits is applications requiring constellation missions. Low resource miniaturised instrumentation with a high degree of integration is a key enabling technology required for maximising exploitation of such mission opportunities.

The Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) has an ongoing development programme aimed at highly miniaturised in-situ space sensor systems and integrated satellite electronics. The laboratory is developing/has delivered several sensors suitable for nanosatellite missions (UK TechDemoSat and the EU QB50 and DISCOVERER missions) and has also built and launched an educational CubeSat. This paper will present an overview of the development programme, discuss some of the sensors launched and under development, discuss data from one of the QB50 sensors, discuss some of the proposed science mission ideas and present a roadmap of the programme vision.