Integrating a CubeSat is not not as easy as it sounds. In addition to housing all necessary hardware, the design has to meet requirements from the launch provider, account for cabling, and ensure everything is designed such that it can be easily put together and taken apart. The structure for the Phoenix CubeSat was developed and fabricated entirely by the student team with these ideas in mind, but we learned several lessons as we worked toward finalizing the structure design and assembly procedure. This episode features another roundtable discussion between Jaime Sanchez de la Vega, Vivek Chacko, and myself, as we recount our experiences and lessons learned on developing the 3U chassis for Phoenix and on putting everything together during flight assembly, integration, and test.

This discussion ended up covering several different topics, so to capture everything, I split this episode up into two parts. Part 1 covers how Phoenix’s 3U structure was designed and how we verified the design along the way. It also covers lessons learned in fabrication as well as the importance of tolerancing, and where we learned to look out for potential issues.

Phoenix was Arizona State University’s first student-led CubeSat to be launched into space in Feb. 2020. It’s objectives aimed to educate undergraduate students on the concepts of space mission engineering and to collect thermal images of U.S. cities to study the Urban Heat Island Effect.

Learn more about Phoenix at the project website: phxcubesat.asu.edu