CubeSat FlatSat

ESA’s latest CubeSat mission is destined to never leave the ground. Instead it is doing its duty as an opened-up ‘FlatSat’ – with its interlinked subsystems spread out across a table at the Agency’s Avionics Laboratory at its ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands. This dissembled CubeSat has all its subsystems easily accessible. This includes its on-board computer, radio and telemetry, its attitude and orbit control system, battery and power system and satellite navigation receiver, along with additional slots to plug in external hardware. This setup allows the team to access and test everything in a straightforward way, compared to a normal satellite where everything ends up tightly integrated and packed together – especially in the case of miniaturised CubeSats.  The subsystsems making up the FlatSat were supplied by satellite engineering company SpaceInventor in Denmark.