The overview doesn't really say what the satellite is for, so I went digging. It looks like you have two payloads, the https://www.qb50.eu/ system for analysing the thin plasma of the upper atmosphere and a 5MP imager (essentially a cellphone camera in space)?
How do you handle comms to ground - do you have to rent time on ground stations or do you have your own?
I quite like the use of multiple STM32F4 microcontrollers, one per subsystem. Are they special spacegrade ones or "regular"?
Hello, and congrats on the project. Could you provide a brief overview as to how does one actually launch the satellite into space? Is there a company that does this, what kind of permits/certifications/etc are needed, etc?
I wonder about the other risks. What do you think is the most effective way to disable a satellite? (And correspondingly, the best way to keep one safe?)
Ha! My first thought on opening the page was "that cleanroom in the picture looks just like the one we have in Yes!Delft". It's a small world after all...
Two common options are magneto-torque rods that that use the earth's magnetic field or reaction wheels that spin masses up and down to provide torques to provide attitude control. They've documented their attitude systems btw on the site [1] it's magneto-torques and a "spin torquer" which I hadn't heard of but looks like it's another type of magnetic attitude control.
If elkos doesn't answer, according to some research I did, 'reaction wheels' are mostly used for changing attitude, and attitude is measured using either star tracking or sunray angle measurement.
I found a page for 2009 that breaks down the cost of a generic educational cubesat down. It includes the ability to do attitude control and a camera and it came to ~52k including launch costs. It's probably fallen since then.
