How to: Fly Your Satellite

35 students participating in the Fly Your Satellite! programme and ESA trainees curious to get a peek behind the scenes of ESOC's spacecraft operations, have participated in the first OPS-SAT Operations Webinar. The webinar was presented jointly by the OPS-SAT Flight Control Team and ESA Academy’s Fly Your Satellite! programme.

The OPS-SAT Flight Control Team offered a privileged insight into the daily operations of an active ESA mission. During the webinar, the students became familiar with OPS-SAT, ESA’s flying laboratory launched in 2019, its ground segment and operations concept. The Flight Control Team shared their rich operational experience with a CubeSat platform and participants took the opportunity to develop an understanding of spacecraft operations and interaction with a spacecraft. The highlight of the evening was a pass in real-time with live comments from the spacecraft operations engineers. Among the key lessons learned were:

• Expect the unexpected: Environmental effects can severely degrade the communications link with a spacecraft and render communication impossible for some time
• Be prepared: Plan what can be planned and remain flexible for what is yet unknown
• Best practices payoff: Both spacecraft and ground segment profit from regular maintenance, which increases mission return

The topic of spacecraft operations will be followed up with another webinar in June, when the topic of mission planning will be on the agenda for the students: Scheduling contacts with a spacecraft, arranging the downlink of scientific data and performing maintenance while carefully managing on-board resources.

ESA’s Fly Your Satellite! programme is a recurring, hands-on programme designed and managed by the ESA Education Office in close collaboration with Universities from ESA Member States, with the objective to complement academic education and inspire, engage, and better prepare university students for their future professions in the space sector.

A flying laboratory, ESA's OPS-SAT is the first of its kind, with the sole purpose of testing and validating new techniques in mission control and on-board satellite systems. OPS-SAT is devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities, that will arise when satellites can fly more powerful on-board computers. The satellite is only 30cm high, but it contains an experimental computer ten times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft. With the webinar, the mission has shown its versatility and value as an educational platform.