Novel 3U stand-alone cubesat architecture for autonomous near earth asteroid fly-by

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to present a novel CubeSat architecture, aimed to explore Near Earth Asteroids. The fast growth in small satellite commercial-off-the-shelf technologies, which characterized the last decade of space industry, is exploited to design a 3U CubeSat able to provide a basic scientific return sufficient to improve the target asteroid dataset. An overview of the current available technologies for each subsystem is presented, followed by a component selection driven by the mission constraints. First a typical asteroid fly-by mission is introduced together with the system and performance requirements. Then each characterizing subsystem is critically analyzed, and the proposed configuration is presented, showing the mission feasibility within only 3.9 kg of wet mass and 385 m/s of total ∆V.