From thin-air to flat-sat in 12 months; the TwenteSat student project
- Paper ID
20399
- author
- company
University of Twente
- country
The Netherlands
- year
2014
- abstract
TwenteSat aims to build a twin-satellite interferometer in space, a research satellite system in preparation of the OLFAR project. The project will be completely done by students that work on a voluntary basis. The target is to have a flat-sat of at least one of the satellites ready by September 2014 (before the IAC2014 in Toronto), the reason for this is the wish to get relatively quick results. The first research on the project was done by September 2013 and most of the recruiting and acquiring finances still has to be done at this point in time. As a result of this the student team will face several problems. They have to adapt to working with a quickly growing group and they need speedy access to money while still being highly unknown to the outside world. This paper analyses the group’s activities and future plans on how to achieve their goal of quickly building a flat-sat. In this paper there are also novel solutions on how to overcome the above mentioned problems. This will help future educational student projects to launch more successfully and with less problems.