Development of CubeSat with COTS camera enabling EO with high GSD

The work presents the CubeSat development and selection process of camera subsystem for Earth Observation (EO) using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components. The 3U CubeSat VZLUSAT-2 implementing <30m Ground Sample Distance (GSD) is described in the work. For the GSD below 30m the 5um pixel size camera chip is used with 100 mm fixed focal length optical lenses system. The camera chip electronics, optics and baffle are described in the work together with camera computer, SW and necessary on-board processing. Special deployment system for S-band antenna was developed and implemented onboard to enable the near-real time observation regime. The necessity of high maturity AOCS system is discussed and solutions to reach high GSD are presented.