Abxfrac/--For the past decade, satcllite design has been an important discipline at thc Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft Universiry of Tcchnology. A major change of tiit predominantly theoretical nature of the satcllitc projects camc into bcing in 2004. with thc completion of an in-house CIass 1UO.OOD Clean Room. Along with equipmcnt in laboraturics located at the Facult) of Electrical Engineering, this facility enables Delft University to not only design, but to actually produce and assemble a small student satellite in housc as well. Learning about this affordable access t o spaet, the space company Dutch Space approached tht Faculty of Aerospace Engineering to discuss the possibility to tcst a new type of thin film solar cells in the space environment. I n addition, the Dutch research inslilulr TNO Science LG Industry showed interest to join in with an autonomous Sun Sensor using a wireless link for data transfer. A third uew technology is an advanced high efficiency transceiver sized for application in picosnd nanosatcllites. With these three new technologim as primary payloads and the spacc proven CubeSat conccpt as a basic principle of design, the Delfi-C3 nanorntclliie is to be the first satellite that is designed and realized at Dclft University of Technology. The paper discusses thc Delfi-C3 mission and its design philosophy. Furthermore, B description of its subsystems snd payloads is given. Delfi-C3 is scheduled for a piggyback launch by the end of 2006.

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The design starting points for the Delfi-C3 university nano-satellite are the absence of a battery, use of a commercial off the shelf structure and on-board computer, single failure survivability strategy and limited operational flexibility. Two architectures were considered during the design of the command and data handling subsystem: a star architecture, with the on-board computer in the center, and a distributed architecture, with the on-board computer as supervisor and microcontrollers for subsystem control. The microcontrollers are connected to the on-board computer by a serial databus based on the I2C standard. To improve its reliability, a simple error detection and correction approach based on parity bits will be used. The star architecture proved too cumbersome to work with and the distributed architecture was selected as the baseline design for Delfi-C3. Full text• Thin Film Solar Cells (TFSC), developed and Downloaded by CARLETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY on July 22, 2015 | http://arc.aiaa.org |

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