NOTE: In order to apply for any of the following theses or internships, the candidate must have no more than 3 exams left.
Alma Mater Ground Station is provided with a 3m dish antenna for communication in S-band frequencies. The antenna has been implemented in order to allow high-rate payloads data download from LEO micro-satellites.
Dish antennas provide high gains as compared to other type of antennas as yaghi or patch antennas, but at the same time require a very precise pointing due to limited beamwidth.
The antenna system has been tested during operations of ESEO missions without success, probably due to high pointing error.
In this framework, the student should implement a test setup aimed at verifying the real-time pointing of the antenna while tracking a LEO satellite. The setup should be implemented by connecting an Inertial Measurement Unit to an Arduino Uno unit installed on the antenna in order to read in real time antenna pointing values.
The main tasks the student is expected to perform are:
Number of students required: 1 student.
Requirements:
A board for autonomous spacecraft collision avoidance (COLA) is currently being designed at the u3S laboratory. As part of the COLA process, the spacecraft hosting the board shall be capable of performing a preliminary screening of possible close encounters with the many existent resident space objects (RSO), based on the minimum orbital intersection distance (MOID). Several methods have been proposed in the literature for accomplish this task, with different levels of accuracy and computational burden.
Through the thesis work, the candidate will assess and critically compare some of the existing MOID algorithms, for selecting the one more suitable for an onboard implementation on embedded hardware, trading-off between computational burden and accuracy of the computation. Towards this end, the research project will encompass at least the following steps
Number of students required:
Requirements:
Via Fontanelle 40, 47121 Forlì (FC)
Available by appointment
Via Fontanelle 40, 47121 Forlì (FC)
+39 0543 374 450
Available by appointment
Via Fontanelle 40, 47121 Forlì (FC)
+39 0543 374456
Available by appointment