Clyde Space

PARADIGM UT CubeSat

Project Name: PARADIGM

Customer:  http://paradigm.ae.utexas.edu

 Aerospace Engineering Department, Centre for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin

The Task: 

PARADIGM (Platform for Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking with Innovative GN&C Methods) is the University of Texas at Austin's contribution to the NASA-funded LONESTAR project, which is a partnership between NASA Johnson Space Center, UT Austin and Texas A&M University (TAMU). LONESTAR will consist of four low earth orbit missions to develop and test autonomous rendezvous and docking technologies using small spacecraft designed and built by university students.

The first LONESTAR mission is scheduled to launch on space shuttle Endeavor Flight STS-127 on May 15, 2009. UT and TAMU are each building a 5-inch cube picosatellite which will carry as a payload a DRAGON GPS receiver, built at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The mission of each satellite is to collect at least two orbits of data from the DRAGON and downlink it to each school's respective ground station.

Clyde Space Involvement:

The PARADIGM vehicle, called BEVO1, uses a Clyde Space 1U CubeSat EPS board with two battery packs and six solar panels for its electrical power system. All electronic components in PARADIGM conform to the CubeSat standard, both to leverage existing commercial products and to conserve volume in the vehicle.

 According to Ron Maglothin, PARADIGM Program Manager,

"We have been using the Clyde Space CubeSat EPS from the beginning of our prototyping work, and have been impressed again and again with its hardiness and durability. Our first board has taken a lot of abuse on the lab bench as we have learned electronics design and testing, and is still working well. We flew it in June 2008 as part of a SHOT II balloon flight payload, and it powered our C&DH board and radio perfectly through the entire flight, with only one battery pack and two solar panels! Clyde Space has given us great technical support, and has been very responsive to our unique requirements. I feel very confident that our Clyde Space EPS board will power us to a successful completion of our mission."

In Summary:

PARADIGM is a pico-scale satellite program, that aims to separate and dock two 5-inch cube satellites. The first generation of the satellites will collect GPS data in two orbits about the Earth and downlink them back to their respective ground stations within two months and will launch in Spring 2009 on the space shuttle.  Clyde Space are very pleased to be supplying the UT PARADIGM satellite project with the Clyde Space EPS, Batteries, and Solar Panels.