ELECTRA advances its mission with a CDF study at ESA ESTEC
ELECTRA is a 3U CubeSat developed by students from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. The mission aims to monitor atmospheric phenomena, in particular the Total Electron Content, relevant for climate research, while also serving as a testbed to demonstrate a miniaturized propulsion unit and GNSS-based orbit determination.
From 23 to 27 February 2026, ten members of the PoliTo team travelled to the European Space Agency’s technical centre, ESTEC, to carry out an intensive phase B study using the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) with a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach, while several additional team members joined the sessions remotely.
The week-long study marked an important milestone, advancing the project from a preliminary design definition towards a more mature and integrated satellite design. Working in ESA’s CDF gave the students first-hand experience of how space missions are developed collaboratively, with multiple engineering disciplines working in parallel and designs updated in real time.
Applying MBSE in the CDF helped the students experience how model centric collaboration reduces inconsistencies, speeds up informed trade off decisions, and strengthens requirement traceability and configuration control, which is crucial for a fast moving student mission. By relying on a shared system model, the team could validate architecture choices and subsystem interactions early, lowering integration risks ahead of their Design Booster 2 Final Design Review, where they will present the complete spacecraft design to ESA experts for evaluation
During the sessions, students refined the overall system architecture and risk management approach, accelerated the design of key spacecraft subsystems with a focus on power, attitude and orbit control, propulsion, and onboard data handling, and advanced their mission operations planning and data post-processing, and assembly, integration, verification, and testing strategies, all with the support from ESA engineers. Additionally, the students used an experimental Immersive Space Design Environment (ISDE) to visualise and interact with the satellite configuration, supporting collaborative design. The ISDE Prototype is currently being developed as an ESA General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) activity by the Danish consortia including NordSpace, SAGA, Khora.
This study was made possible thanks to the strong support of the CDF team and the financial contribution from the ESA Education Office. It also highlights how ESA's professional facilities can be made accessible to university teams through participation in ESA Education programmes. Teams involved in Fly Your Satellite!, Design Booster, and Test Opportunities already benefit from access to the CubeSat Support Facility, a dedicated facility based at ESEC-Galaxia in Belgium that helps student projects test small educational space equipment and payloads. The successful use of the CDF further demonstrates how additional ESA facilities can be used to advance student projects in a way that goes beyond typical university resources.
This was the first time in recent years that an educational satellite mission made use of ESA's CDF, and the experience proved to be a great success, both technically and educationally. By the end of the study, ELECTRA’s design had reached a higher level of technical maturity, and the team gained valuable insight into how space missions are developed, providing a realistic glimpse into professional spacecraft engineering.