Development of Cubesats in an Educational Context

For almost 10 years, the development of Cubesat sized student satellites at Aalborg University has played an integral part of the education of engineers within electrical engineering and information technology.


This paper focuses on, not only the benefits of letting students develop a student satellite as part of their curriculum, but also on some of the may pitfalls there exist when letting them work on such complex systems, as a satellite.


Having up to 50 students working in up to 15 groups on different parts of a satellite at the same time can be challenging. Telling them, that the objective is to build a satellite, and that they should find out amongst themselves how the satellite should be constructed poses an even greater challenge. However, at Aalborg University, we have always emphasized, that it is the students that should design and build the satellite.

By letting the students be in charge of everything on the satellite, they quickly realize, that they need some kind of structuring and regular meeting and review activities. However, by not forcing the students to do this, but instead letting them figure it out by them selves has proven highly beneficiary. The students now do not make interface control documents because some teacher has told them to, but because they themselves see the usefulness in making them.

With this, it could sound like, that the students would be able to develop everything by themselves without any instructor involvement. However, our experience also tells us, that this is not the case. The students always need a certain amount of instruction and guidance. At Aalborg University we have during the past 10 years gain a considerable amount of experience in just how much guidance is needed for the students to succeed in their endeavor to build and operate a satellite.

Another aspect, which is addressed in this paper, is the challenge of keeping students motivated through the entire project period. As a student cubesat project typically lasts around 3 to 4 years from commencing the preanalysis to launch it can at times seem as a daunting task. Thus another task for the instructors is to properly facilitate several short term milestones, which can be achieved and demonstrated within 6-12 month periods. This is even more important when seen in light of, that bachelor students typically are with the university for 3 years, and master students for an additional 2 years.


By letting the students experience in vivo all the possible pitfalls of developing highly complex interconnected systems, they not only learn about how to build up solid requirement specification and interface control documents to other systems, they also learn, that building such complex system is a dynamics negotiation process, where everybody needs to contribute to the solution in order for the mission to be a success. This, we believe, is the gem in doing student satellites: That the students learn how to cooperate within large groups – just as they will need to do in real life after the university.


It is our experience, that if we let the students free to develop a satellite, then, through proper guidance, then they will not only build a satellite, but often a better and more inovative one than initially imagined.