AMSAT announce NextGen CubeSat program

AMSAT will work with a university student engineering team to develop the NextGen Cubesat.

NextGen Program Manager, Alex Harvilchuck, N3NP introduced this new program at the AMSAT Symposium.

Alex revealed program goals and its initial plans with a paper in the Proceedings and presentations to the AMSAT Board of Directors and to the attendees during Symposium
sessions.

NextGen consists of AMSAT volunteer mentors working with IBM Global Services Systems Engineering Division, and SUNY-Binghamton (also called University of Binghamton) senior level engineering students participating in their 'capstone' engineering project.

Alex summarized the NexGen program goals:

• Intial analysis of ARISSat-1, documenting the systems, and analysis of the lessons learned from ARISSat-1 and other prior spacecraft to create a building block architecture for future satellites.

• Open, modular, evolutionary, and documented design based on this analysis.

• Redesigning the ARISSat-1 Power Systems into a next generation power system using supercapacitors instead of batteries and reducing the footprint of some of the boards.

• Analysis and modification to the structure to incorporate deployable solar panels with a scalable design that will work for 1U, 2U and 3U sizes.

• Design a Picosat-class bus structure that AMSAT, or any other University, can use for 1U, 2U, or 3U CubeSat spacecraft. AMSAT could make the open design available at low-to-no-cost to qualified University groups.

• An Engineering Model of the NextGen CubeSat spacecraft bus will be on display at the Dayton Hamvention AMSAT Booth for everyone to study.

Alex summarized, "Starting with our initial core team of 34 students, plus advisers, mentors and volunteers at Binghamton University this will be an ongoing effort. It is not a one time event, but the start of a stable, evolutionary design process that will further STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) with the Next Generation of engineers and amateur radio operators. We are looking for other individuals and University/School teams to participate in all aspects of the spacecraft design - RF Systems - Guidance, Navigation, Control & Experiment Systems - Power & Structure Systems."

Volunteer mentors are needed! Even if you only have an hour a week, you can mentor a student over the phone or you can peer review a document that the students are working on. If you have more than an hour a week, you can implement a small design change to an existing subsystem; you could respin the board layout to meet a reduced form
factor; you could redesign a module to use different technology. Contact Alex via e-mail at amsat@elkmtn.org .

AMSAT's Board of Directors has approved the support of the University of Binghamton NextGen Cubesat Proposal and agreed to provide $1,200.00 in immediate funding to the Binghamton Foundation to support student expenses and initially budgeted $10,000.00 to cover material costs
associated with hardware development between September 2009 and May 2010. The Board will review progress at the end of the first semester.

Amsat News, Alex, N3NP and AMSAT Board of Directors