About
Overview
The Satellite Design Competition invites students to design, construct and operate a nanosatellite payload system with the objective to acquire as much information from an analogue lunar nanosatellite mission. Students shall create a payload concept, trade off performance parameters and pass through a rigorous review process with panels of experts within the space industry. The competition aims to reach out to students from multiple scientific fields, including, but not limited to, physicists, engineers and computer scientists.
The competition aims to:
- Challenge students to perform a complex, systems engineering task of the development of a payload to a set of real space mission requirements
- Gain exposure and experience of the typical design processes and protocols in industry projects, including multiple project reviews
- Enable students to apply taught technical skills and learn new ones relevant to a job in the space industry in an applicable project environment
- Provide students with an opportunity to develop and practice other important and transferable skills, such as teamwork, leadership and project management
This year marks the third instalment of the Satellite Design Competition. With support from SSPI, previous years had teams research and identify an astronomy opportunity for which cubesat technology offers a high-quality solution and provide a high-level design for one or more cubesats capable of carrying out that mission, where a final extensive mission report was submitted.
Recent developments of the Satellite Design Competition have enabled an expansion to include a build phase, where competing teams have the opportunity to design and construct a nanosatellite payload, thanks to a new collaboration with Open Cosmos. The nanosatellite payload will be integrated on-board Open Cosmos’ 3U beeKit platform and teams shall be scored over a series of tasks on a challenge day at the Harwell Science, Technology and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire next summer.
For more information, please read the Satellite Design Competition 2019-2020 Rules & Requirements document:
COVID-19 Changes
Due to the extreme circumstances of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, the competition was restructured to accommodate the fact that students no longer had access to their university equipment and laboratories. As a result, the build and test phase of the competition was replaced with an extended mission design of a real Lunar cubesat mission, using their CDR report as a baseline and being required to use Open Cosmos' 3U satellite platform. Teams were provided with a new mission outline and mission requirements, which can be viewed in further depth below.