The Cubesat (1U) called XaTcobeo has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) (www.esa.int/education) to be flown during the debut of Europe’s new Vega launch vehicle, expected in 2009.

XATCOBEO is a satellite system to be used as an educational demonstrator made up of a space segment and a ground segment. It is a heritage of the experience acquired with OPTOS Project which is a 3U cubesat under development at INTA. OPTOS is planned to be launch in early 2009 with DNEPR/PSLV (TBD).

The space segment of XATCOBEO consists of the spacecraft, which is included in the category of picosatellites, with some experiments on board. In order to simplify the development and to save cost and time, cubesat standard [RD2] will be used as a basis for the spacecraft design. As a first approach, Cal Poly’s P-POD was selected as deployer but any other system compatible with cubesat standard could be used.

Payloads operation will be supported by the different subsystems of the satellite. Experiments initially selected (TBC) are:

SRAD: Software Radio board for Communications.
SPAD: mechanism for Solar Panel Deployment.
RDS: Radiation dose sensor.

The ground segment will provided tracking, telemetry and command over the spacecraft, as well as data management during the operational life of the system which is initially estimated in 6 months.


The main expected benefit of this educational project is to provide to under and graduate students the opportunity to be integrated in a working group leaded by international recognized professionals with the same quality management, design, developing and validation requirements that are used for commercial satellite projects. 4 Ph.D students and more than 30 under-graduante students will be integrated and will lead all the task of this project.