Postmortem examination of PicSat, the first European astronomical CubeSat mission

The goal of the PicSat satellite was to observe the transit of planet Beta Pictoris b. More exactly, it was to survey the photometry of the star Beta Pictoris during the few months when the Hill sphere of the planet was passing in front of the star. The payload was built around a 38mm off-axis parabola and a novel type of single mode photometer. The satellite platform subsystems were bought off-the-shelves from private companies. After 3 years of design and qualification, the satellite was successfully launched on a 505 km orbit the 10st January 2018. First contact was obtained within hours, and commissioning of the sub-systems was performed during the next 10 weeks. However, on the 20th of March the satellite fell silent. During this talk, I will present the science, the satellite, as well as the technical difficulties we have faced. The interest for small space missions (of the order of a few million Euros) is still debated inside the scientific community. Mostly because the off-the-shelf technology is not yet fully mature. But I’ll show that it has interesting prospects for the near future, and transiting exoplanets is one of them.