Objectives and project planning¶

Télécom Bretagne has procured a Pumpkin Cubesat kit and other set of tools for education purposes. For more information, please visit Equipment inventory.

In order to take full advantage of this kit and begin with the development of different sub-systems, it was proposed a Cubesat-based project as part of the Master SCS program. The assigned project is "Experimentation and development of a beacon transmitter for a Cubesat platform".

For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to our Cubesat project, developed during 2014/2015, at the Télécom Bretagne laboratory at the SUPAERO campus, as SCS-Cubesat project.

As it may be guessed, the project main objective is to develop a prototype spacecraft with a beacon transmitter, which will be based on a low cost, low power 434 MHz transmitter.

The SCS-Cubesat project is a very tiny project compared to those big missions from huge space agencies, like NASA or ESA.

From a practical and factual point of view, tanking into account the project objectives, there is no needs of having a system engineering structure. However, it is still needed some basic project planning and control.

Although any system engineering task would be almost useless in our SCS-Cubesat project, as it was previously explained, it would be interesting, from an academic point of view, to have an approach to this field since we are working with a small spacecraft subsystem.

Introduction to Systems Engineering¶

Systems engineering is the science of developing a system capable of meeting requirements within often opposed constraints. The main task is to find a safe and balanced design in the face of opposing interests and multiple conflicting requirements. In other words, system engineering is about balancing organizational and technical interactions in complex systems.

Thus, it is about tradeoffs, compromises and generalists rather than specialists in a complex system development process.

Systems engineering processes are system design, product realisation and technical management

Project life cycle for space missions¶

SCS-Cubesat project planning¶

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)¶

Tasks description¶

Gantt planning and PERT analysis¶

Dev Log

References¶

• NASA Systems Engineering Handbook
  (NASA/SP-2007-6105 Rev1)
  Available on Amazon.com