Syed Ashar Akhtar

Design and Development of Obc of a Pico Spacecraft: a Valuable Guide to Credit Card Sized Low Power Onboard Computer Design and Development for Palmsat, a Pico-spacecraft Syed Ashar Akhtar

This book presents a design and development experience of On Board Computer for a new generation PICO Spacecraft named as PALMSAT. PICO Spacecrafts are restricted in terms of size, power consumption and the total mass. Mostly commercial off the shelf components are involved in the design and development of the spacecraft. PALMSAT is students' project being developed at University of Surrey. It has many subsystems for specific tasks. OBC is undeniable one of the most important subsystem for the spacecraft as it communicates with ground station and controls and monitors other subsystems on the spacecraft. Software design includes implementing telemetry and telecommands packets encoding and decoding during ground communication using a propriety protocol, named pSIP. OBC also establishes communication with other subsystems using propriety CAN-SU protocol. Hardware design selects PIC18 family processor with ECAN to meet requirements of the OBC. The components have been carefully selected to be compatible, low power and high performance. This book gives a great exposure to students and a valuable reference for supervisors. Author is pleased to respond any queries regarding this book