Preliminary Design of a Stand-Alone Mars CubeSat Mission Integrating DLR In-House Technologies

Preliminary Design of a Stand-Alone Mars CubeSat Mission Integrating DLR In-House Technologies

Juan Marí, Héctor (TU Delft Aerospace Engineering)

Noomen, R. (mentor)
Ho, T.M. (graduation committee)
Zandbergen, B.T.C. (graduation committee)
van Kampen, E. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Aerospace Engineering

2023-10-10

CubeSat missions have been deployed to cislunar space and beyond, paving the way for the next significant advancement: a dedicated CubeSat mission to explore a planet near Earth. To contribute to this goal, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has developed radiation-hardened small satellite technologies, including communications, power and onboard computer subsystems. This study presents a stand-alone Mars exploration mission using the CubeSat standard that will demonstrate DLR’s in-house technologies. This mission will perform an independent transfer to the Red Planet, achieve orbital insertion, and conduct measurements on its lower atmosphere and gravity field. A system concept has been created by integrating the in-house technologies, investigating the necessary Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, and performing the mission analysis to assess the feasibility of the mission. The resulting 12U CubeSat has a 20.8 kg wet mass, 6.3 km/s low-thrust maneuvering capability and can generate up to 90 W of power at Mars. The proof-of-concept mission is planned for a 4-year duration.

Preliminary Design
Mars
CubeSat
Systems Engineering
Mission Analysis
Stand-Alone
DLR

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7b60761c-8ed5-47f2-af76-d205f11758b1

Student theses

master thesis

© 2023 Héctor Juan Marí