Architecture of a Small Low-Cost Satellite

D. Del Corso, C. Passerone, L. M. Reyneri, C. Sansoè, M. Borri, S. Speretta, M. Tranchero

Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento di Elettronica
corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

Abstract
This paper presents the architecture of a small univer-
sity satellite that we have developed. The main design cri-
teria were low cost and fault tolerance, which have been
achieved by using Commercial Off The Shelf components
and by replicating all critical functions, while monitoring
the state of the system for failures. The focus of the paper
is on overall organization, design partitioning and details
of the actual hardware. We show that the development of a
low-cost satellite is feasible with a very limited budget.
1 Introduction
Today industrial and academic interest in space-related
activities is rapidly growing. Yet a cost-effective access to
space would open an even wider range of new opportunities
and markets. Unfortunately there is still a lack of devices,
circuits and systems suited to develop satellites, ground sta-
tions and related services at costs within the budget of aca-
demic institutions and SMEs.
We started a design activity at Dept. of Electronics, to-
gether with other dept.s of our university, aimed at develop-
ing a low-cost, though fully operational, nanosatellite with
a very limited budget. The design made extensive use of
cheap off-the-shelf components (COTS).
The design activity started three years ago, gathered
about 10 staff and PhDs, plus 20 undergraduate students,
who designed manufactured and tested the PiCPoT satel-
lite [1] shown in Figure 1, after an effort of about 12 man-
years. The satellite has been launched on July, 26, 2006,
from Baykonour. Unfortunately a failure of the launcher
has forced its destruction before being released on its orbit.
2 Design Constraints
An airborne satellite must comply hard constraints re-
lated with the severe space environment. The design and the
assembly of the device must abide tighter rules than usual
“good and safe design” criteria applied for any electronic
system. Moreover, the choice of using COTS components
and technology, allowing failures at the device level, makes
Figure 1. The engineering model of PiCPoT
mandatory the adoption of design techniques which guaran-
tee system operation, even in presence of limited failures.
The design constraints were the following.
Temperature ranges: thermal simulations of the satellite
structure identified the actual temperature ranges. The out-
side range is [0, +70]◦ C; the parts subject to this range are
external ones, such as solar panels and antennas. The tem-
perature range inside the satellite is [+30, +70]◦ C; all elec-
tronic circuits must comply with this range. This last range
is compatible with standard commercial devices.
Vacuum: vacuum is not a problem for sealed electronic
components, but reduces the power dissipation capability
due to missing convection.
Vibrations: PCBs have small size (about 8 × 8cm), and are
mechanically blocked at the four edges, therefore vibrations
are kept within acceptable limits. More bulky components
are secured to PCB. A more critical point is represented by
connectors. Direct board-to.board connectors are kept in
place by the mechanical fixture of boards. Other connec-
tions use flexible PCBs or small flat cables; in these case
silicon glue is used to keep the movable part in place.
EMI and signal integrity: the external structure is metal-
lic, and all inner circuits are well shielded against external
EMI. Ground planes and PCB layout of RF and digital units
limit EMI towards low-level analog signals.
Radiations: the planned orbit is close to the Van Allen
belts, where a limited amount of radiation is present; these

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 radiations may cause latch-up in CMOS devices, and single-
event upsets in memories. Due to the low orbit, total dose Table 1. Power budget
effects has not been considered. Memory is protected using Device Duty Cycle Peak Power Avg Power
duplication of critical SW segments.
PowerSwitch 100% 20 mW 20 mW
Proc A & B 6% 200 mW 12 mW
3 Operation, Timing, Fault Tolerance Payload 0.5% 3.84 W 21 mW
TxRx 2.6% 17.2 W 443 mW
The design of PiCPoT is aimed at increasing tolerance Losses in Batteries & switching 1.07 W
to faults and radiation effects while using only COTS com- Solar Panels -2.24 W
ponents. Architecture and operation are organized around a Margin -674 mW
redundant central power management and timing unit (Pow-
erSwitch), which drives two processor chains, called A and
B, for housekeeping measurements (temperature, voltage, SolarPanel1
Solar
Solar
Panel1
Panel1
Solar
Solar Panel1
Panel1
current), and a payload board that controls the cameras. PowerSupply1
PowerSupply1
PowerSupply1
Every minute chain A is activated: the timing unit se- PowerSupply1
PowerSupply1
lects the most charged battery, then it switches the on-board
processor A (ProcA) on. ProcA boots by selecting one of
three copies of its program and acquires telemetry data from Battery5Battery6
Battery3Battery4
the other boards. It then waits about 5 s to receive a com- Battery1Battery2
mand on the 437 MHz radio link. When a valid command
is received, it sends an acknowledge back and executes the
command. If required, the payload board is switched on. If PowerSwitchA PowerSwitchB

no command is received, ProcA sends telemetry to ground

and requests the timing unit to turn power off.
In any case, the timing unit switches chain A off after
at most 55 s. Like a watchdog, this guarantees that every
minute all processors are turned off and booted again. If
either the program or its execution have been corrupted by
a radiation-induced upset, re-booting from a different copy
of the program allows to recover from the fault. Similarly,
if at any time a latch-up takes place, detected by current
measurements rising over a given threshold, the timing unit
immediately turns power off. This recovers from the latch-
up and avoids damages to the devices.
A similar sequence of actions takes place at time t =
30 s on chain B, which implements the same functionali-
ties as chain A, but with different components and using the
2.4 GHz radio link.
The operation of the ground station and the communi-
cation protocol have been developed according to the oper-
ation cycles described above. As soon as PiCPoT is visi-
ble, the antenna is aimed towards it and a command is sent
on the 437 MHz link; if the satellite responds with an ac-
knowledge, a new command can be immediately sent. Oth-
erwise, the command is repeated on the 2.4 GHz link. This
sequence is iterated as long as PiCPoT is over the horizon.
4 Electronic subsystems
PiCPoT has six different On-Board sub-systems: Pow-
erSupply, PowerSwitch, ProcA, ProcB, Payload and TxRx.
Their interconnection signals are summarized in Fig 2.
ProcA Payload ProcB
TxRx 437MHz TxRx 2.4GHz
Figure 2. PiCPoT internal Structure
4.1 PowerSupply
The EPS (Electronic Power Supply) is responsible of
powering all the sub-systems. The main power sources are
5 GaAs solar panels mounted around the satellite. Each
of them has a dedicated Maximum Power Point Tracker
(MPPT) made with an hysteretic switching power converter,
chosen for the small number of components needed and be-
cause it could be implemented with only bipolar IC, not sen-
sitive to latch-up. Redundancy is a key-word in the devel-
opment of this satellite: in fact there are five independent
converters to allow the system to survive, although with re-
duced performances, even if four of them get damaged. The
satellite uses 6 battery packs, divided into two groups which
power the two independent halves of the satellite: 2 × 7.2 V
900 mAh Ni-Cd and 4 × 7.2 V 1500 mAh Li-Po batteries.
Two separated redundant switches are used to select
which battery to charge from both On-Board Processors
(OBCs) to ensure that the failure of one of them could not
prevent the correct functioning of the other. The Power-
Supply board is also responsible of the analog sensor signal
conditioning before the digital conversion which take place
in the two on-board processors. System power budget is
summarized in Table 1, where all the consuming power de-

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 vices are listed (the power wasted in charging the batteries
and the losses in the charger are also present) and the power
generated by solar panels is considered negative.
4.2 PowerSwitch
This board is composed of two completely independent
sub-systems (one for every OBC) with the following tasks:
• Select battery to power the on-board processor
• Voltage regulation for OBCs
• Schedule the power up of OBCs
• Latch-up events count
The design of every sub-system followed diverse project
strategies in order to maximize the chance of success of the
mission. The first sub-system (connected to ProcA) uses a
Microchip PIC microcontroller ([2]), while the other sub-
system uses a Texas Instrument MSP430. The most im-
portant criterion of selection of the micro-controllers was
the power consumption, since these processors are always
active and the power budget is quite critical due to the ex-
tremely low solar panel surface. At power-up (when the
satellite is separated from the launch pod) both Power-
Switch processors start a wait cycle of 5 minutes not to
interfere with launcher electronic systems. After that ev-
ery OBC is turned on for a maximum of 55 seconds over
one minute. This way every OBC will not be influenced
by SEU (Single Event Upset) occurred in the previous cy-
cle (FLASH memory is considered not affected by radiation
in an expected life period of 90 days)[3]. The two proces-
sors power on cycles are time shifted by 30 seconds, in this
way both transmitters should not interfere with each other,
keeping also the peak power consumption low. Together
with board processors, PowerSwitch powers also the trans-
mitters and monitors their current consumption: a threshold
comparator monitors the current and switches off both sys-
tems in case of excessive consumption (in case of latch-up,
for example). PowerSwitch processors are also protected
against latch-up.
4.3 ProcA and ProcB
Redundancy is the key word of the project, so the On-
Board Processors (OBCs) are replicated to increase the
chance of success of the mission. We used two different
commercial processors suited for low-power applications: a
Chipcon CC1010 [4], called ProcA, and a TI MSP430 [5],
called ProcB (see Fig. 2). Both processors have similar
tasks; however, their design solutions are quite different to
increase system reliability and to prevent similar bugs to
crash both systems while executing the same operation.
Data is stored in two different memory types: in the
MSP430 internal FLASH memory for ProcB, and in a Fer-
roElectric RAM [6] for ProcA. For both devices, the data
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retention specifications (see [7, 8, 3] for further details) well
exceed the expected lifetime of the satellite, which is as-
sumed to be 3 months. Moreover, part of the behavior of
one of the two OBCs has been implemented on a Xilinx
CPLD [9], after verifying the reliability of this device is the
space environment [10].
Both processors are responsible of many different tasks,
i.e. data acquisition from PowerSupply analog sensors,
battery charging process, data storage and trasmission
to ground. While the previous operations happen au-
tonomously, other must be requested from the ground sta-
tion by issuing a command. The commands that have
been implemented include requests to send housekeeping
telemetry and extended telemetry (only maximum, mini-
mum, mean and standard deviation of all sensors), shooting
a picture and download of a complete picture or part of it.
4.4 Cameras Handling
PiCPoT payload is a set of three color cameras, equipped
with different focal length lenses. Cameras are commercial
units from Mintron, model MTV-54C5P: they have a stan-
dard PAL video output and a Sony 1/4” CCD sensor with
542 × 586 active pixels. Although they produce video, only
still pictures are actually stored.
When requested to shoot a picture, the board switches
one camera on. The camera analog output is converted
into an ITU-R BT.656-4 digital stream using the low power
TI TVP5150A video decoder. The digital stream is sent
to the video port of a Blackfin BF532 processor, and a
raw image is stored in memory. For redundancy, both
an SDRAM (8Mbytes Micron MT48LC8M8A2TG-75) and
an SRAM (2Mbytes Toshiba TC55VBM416AFTN55) are
present. The camera is then switched off to save energy.
Afterwards, software on the processor converts the raw
image into a compressed JPEG picture, using the freely
available IJG library ([11]). At 100MHz, compression
typically takes less than 5 seconds; the processor clock
frequency is kept low in order to decrease the power
supply voltage and save total energy consumption. The
JPEG picture is then stored on flash memory (2Mbytes
ST M29W160EB). The NOR architecture, albeit being less
dense than a comparable NAND architecture, has been
shown to be less prone to cosmic radiation effects with re-
spect to the latter ([3]).
In addition to the already mentioned components, SPI
and UART serial connections are used to communicate with
the two satellite housekeeping processors. A JTAG inter-
face is also present, to allow programming and testing of
the camera board before it is assembled inside the satellite.
4.5 Radio-Frequency Subsystem
The satellite operates on two different frequencies: UHF
at 437.480 MHz and S-Band at 2440 MHz, connected re-
 Transmitter Preamplifier Power Amplifier
CC2400 UPC2762 RF5189
Antenna Switch
Receiver Low Noise Amp RF 300−5
CC2400 MAX2644
SPI to SHF subsystem
ProcB
Power Amplifier
RF2175
Transceiver Antenna Switch
CC1010 NAIS TQ2−3V
ProcA TxRx
UHF subsystem
Figure 3. Radio-Frequency Subsystem
spectively to the ProcA/B OBC and associated Power-
Switch sections. The two subsystems are independent and
their functions are interchangeable. Both channels imple-
ment an half-duplex protocol, sharing the same frequency
for downlink and uplink. The frequencies are allocated in
the radioamateur bands, authorized by AMSAT [12].
The UHF downlink was designed to be compatible with
the amateur PK96 packet radio. The telemetry data packet
format is publicly available from our site [1]. The S-Band
link data are organized in a similar way but the transceiver’s
modulation scheme is not compatible with amateur stations.
The RF subsystem is mainly located on the TxRx board.
The UHF link is based on the transceiver included in the
ProcA OBC, TI/Chipcon CC1010, the TxRx board hosts
only the power amplifier and the antenna switch (Fig. 3).
The power amplifier, RFMD RF2175, provides an output
level of +34 dBm, while the antenna relay is a NAIS TQ2-
3V. A relay is more radiation tolerant than an active switch,
and more power efficient than many diode circuits.
The S-band link is based on the transceiver TI/Chipcon
CC2400. Although the CC2400 incorporates both receiver
and transmitter, we decided to use two different devices,
to simplify PCB design, eliminating the risk of unwanted
coupling between transmit and receive paths. The output
power is provided by two stages of amplification, a NEC
UPC2762, followed by a RFMD RF5189. The output power
is +32 dBm. The antenna switch is an electromechani-
cal relay. The receiver is preceded by an LNA, Maxim
MAX2644, with a sensitivity of about −120 dBm. The con-
nection to the ProcB OBC is via a SPI link.
The UHF system is equipped with a helical antenna,
while S-band uses a Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA).
5 Ground Segment
The Ground station uses a parabolic antenna (28 dB gain)
for S-band and an helical antenna (14 dB gain) for UHF. The
antennas share a single rotator, controlled by a PC.
The UHF section is based on commercial equipment: the
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received signal is amplified by a LNA and fed to a
Yaesu FT847 transceiver. Baseband data is converted by
a TNC. The same PC controlling the rotator manages the
received telemetry data or picture. On uplink, commands
are assembled by the PC, converted in analog via the audio
board and sent to the FT847. Output power is up to 50 W.
The S-band system is derived from the satellite architec-
ture. The received signal is amplified by an LNA (Kuhne
LNA2227A) and fed to a CC2400 used as a receiver. The
device is controlled by a PIC microcontroller which collects
the output stream and temporarily stores it. The PIC com-
municates via RS232 with the PC. The uplink commands
originate from the PC and transferred to the PIC, which
controls the antenna switch and a second CC2400 used as
a transmitter. The RF signal is amplified by a PA (Kuhne
KU2325A) to a maximum of 20 W and fed to the antenna.
6 Conclusions
The paper has shown that the development of a low-cost
nanosatellite is feasible with a very limited budget (less than
50,000efor components and equipment, plus 12 man-years
of effort and 40,000efor launch), while keeping a high level
of tolerance to faults and radiation effects. Five processors,
nearly two redundant satellites, three cameras, one inertia
motor and passive attitude control have been squeezed into
a cube 13 cm in side. The ground station has been placed on
the roof of our university. The satellite has been launched
on July 26, 2006, although a defect in the launcher forced
to blow it after 84s from launch. We presently plan to up-
grade one of the two remaining engineering models to a full
flight model and launch it as soon as new budget for another
launch will be available.
References
[1] PiCPoT. [Online]: http://polimage.polito.it/picpot
[2] Microchip. [Online]: http://www.microchip.com
[3] T. Miyahira and G. Swift, “The use of advanced flash
memories in satellite applications: Radiation responses
and mitigation choices,” in Proceedings of the Military
and Aerospace Applications of Programmable Devices and
Technologies Conference, September 1998.
[4] Chipcon. [Online]: http://www.chipcon.com
[5] Texas Instruments. [Online]: http://www.ti.com
[6] RamtronTM , FM25L256, 256 kb FRAM serial 3 V Memory,
2005.
[7] D. Nguyen and L. Scheick, TID testing of ferroelectric non-
volatile RAM, August 2003.
[8] L. Scheick, S. Guertin, and D. Nguyen, SEU evaluation of
FeRAM memories for space applications, 2004.
[9] XilinxTM , CoolRunner XPLA3 CPLD, April 2005.
[10] Xilinx, Device reliability report, August 2004.
[11] Independent JPEG Group. [Online]: http://www.ijg.org
[12] Amsat. [Online]: http://www.amsat.com