Design of a Small Educational Satellite for the Italian High School Students: The EduSAT Project

This chapter deals with the design of the EduSAT microsatellite: a small educational satellite developed by the Group of Astrodynamics of University of Roma “Sapienza” (GAUSS), on the basis of its previous experience. The UNISAT program (UNIversity SATellite) started at School of Aerospace Engineering of Roma in the early nineties. The EduSAT Project is funded and coordinated by Italian Space Agency with the aim to promote space education among high school students and to support the qualification and scientific careers of young people (university students, PhD students and young researchers). Another target of this program is to develop a small space mission for low cost scientific experiments and technological tests in orbit. The launch of EduSAT microsatellite is scheduled in 2010: a cluster launch in Low Earth Orbit, performed by Russian-Ukrainian DNEPR Launch Vehicle. This chapter synthesizes project motivations, program organization and describes system architecture and satellite main subsystems design.