Applications

What your team controls on a single-payload mission, what gets flown per segment and what fits in the slot.

What your team controls on a dedicated mission

Operating profile

Power-ups, duty cycle, voltage and temperature sweeps and logging cadence are defined for your DUT at kick-off and adjusted in orbit if the data calls for it.

Several DUTs per slot

Parts from the same family, lot or process in the same payload slot. Power, channels and test time split agreed before flight.

Ground correlation

SEE, SEL, thermal drift and TID degradation measured over months, to check against your beam and TVAC campaigns and tune your rate models.

Common time base

Platform TM —per-line V/I, temperatures, attitude, position— is logged on the same time base as your channels: every event comes with its context.

Data ownership

Raw and processed data belong to the customer, with no licence reserved: publishable, usable in a qualification package or shareable under NDA.

Flight traceability

A certificate with dates, orbit, accumulated environment and observed behaviour, cross-referenced to the performance report and the dataset.

Propagation, eclipses and β angle of the reference orbit, live.

Open mission control

A CubeSat just released from its deployer floats against the black of space, next to one of the station's solar arrays. — Image: NASA · public domain · illustrative, not an Apollo Orbitals mission.

What gets flown and characterised

Indicative. The actual measurement plan is closed at kick-off, against the channels and resources in the ICD.

Illustration 16-QAM constellation and spectrum: with temperature the points rotate and spread, and the carrier shifts.

Communications constellations

What gets flown: RF front-ends, SDRs, power conversion and baseband processing.
Typically characterised: Power per mode, thermal drift of frequency and output power, SEFIs in processing.

Illustration Pushbroom sweep over the Earth and the profile of the line the detector reads; upsets in orange. Earth: NASA Blue Marble.

Earth observation

What gets flown: Detector front-end electronics, on-board compression and processing, mass memory.
Typically characterised: Noise and offsets versus temperature, upsets in processing and memory, retention and corrected errors.

Illustration Memory bitmap: SEUs appear in orange and scrubbing, the blue line, corrects them as it passes.

On-board computing

What gets flown: COTS FPGAs, SoCs, GPUs and inference accelerators; DDR and flash.
Typically characterised: SEU and SEFI rates, SEL detected through supply current, effectiveness of scrubbing and mitigation.

Illustration DC-DC output through the sun-eclipse cycle, with droop and recovery at each load step; below, the switching node.

Power

What gets flown: DC-DC and POL, GaN and SiC stages, distribution, protection and BMS.
Typically characterised: Efficiency and drift over real sun-eclipse cycles, load-transient response, TID degradation.

Illustration GNSS satellites in view and the DUT PPS, in orange, against the reference, with a drifting offset.

PNT

What gets flown: GNSS receivers, oscillators and time references, synchronisation electronics. Antenna access depends on the ICD: [PENDING].
Typically characterised: Frequency stability versus temperature and radiation; with an antenna, acquisition and solution quality.

Illustration Supply current: a latch-up crosses the threshold, the protection cuts power and the part restarts.

COTS and automotive grade

What gets flown: Industrial and AEC-Q parts heading for a space variant.
Typically characterised: SEL and TID margins and parametric drift against the datasheet.

ITAR or EAR content? See export control.

Accommodation constraints

Fits

No external access

Power, computing, memory, baseband RF, sensors without line of sight, detector electronics without their own optics.

Depends on the ICD

With an aperture or antenna

Optics and detectors with an aperture, antennas, magnetometers or other field sensors away from the bus. External access for the payload: [PENDING].

Does not fit

Out of scope

Propulsion, cryogenics, fine pointing, high continuous power, bulk data download or more than 1U of volume.