Curium One Spacecraft

Operate an innovative redundant GPU processing platform powering the ‘Major Tom’ project.

Operate an innovative redundant GPU processing platform powering the ‘Major Tom’ project.

The mission is designed to test and validate new electronics such as GPU’s and sensors for future commercial space missions. 

In our first space project approach we have been taking care of image acquisition, interface conversion and video pipeline. That included integration of FPGA gateware with Linux driver and GStreamer video pipeline. All of that was bound by the control software package. Curium One will be launched on Ariane 6 pilot launch – Astris kick stage.

“Embevity is a strong and reliable partner for our Curium satellite mission, launching in 2023 mission on the Ariane 6 maiden flight. They develop key elements for our GPU powered 360°, high-definition camera solution and provide great engineering input to make this mission even better. We appreciate their support and expertise and are delighted to work with them also on future space projects.”

The project mission is for the satellite to conduct a series of telecommunications related experiments and provide “store and forward” functionality for amateur radio operators around the world. A public dashboard will show the history and nature of radio interactions. The amateur radio store and forward functionality (or frame forwarder) is implemented as a message queue containing a maximum of 256 messages. Each message carries a source and destination callsign, a message up to 128 bytes and a TTL (Time to Live) field. The TTL is the time in seconds that the message should live in the queue before a periodic task of the satellite deletes it. The maximum allowed TTL is one day. In case the queue is full, and a new valid frame is received, the oldest message is deleted. To avoid abuse of the forwarder, there is a frame limit of 1 frame per 5 seconds. Frames that are sent faster than this limit are discarded. The satellite periodically selects up to 10 messages in a round-robin way and broadcasts them.

From concept to space in just 6 months, Replicator1 was successfully deployed from Ariane-6 on its maiden flight, which means our main mission objective of validating our technology for launch has been achieved.

Tammo Jan Dijkema, 2024-08-1:

• On July 9, 2024, with the first launch of the Ariane 6 rocket, various cubesats were placed into orbit around the Earth. One of these cubesats was Curium One, which was developed with contributions from the Libre Space Foundation. One of the goals of this satellite was to demonstrate a new communication system.
• Unfortunately, it soon became apparent after the launch that no signals from Curium One could be received by conventional ground stations. However, when we aimed the Dwingeloo Telescope at this satellite, we were able to detect signals on the first attempt. These signals were very weak, which explains why smaller ground stations couldn’t detect anything. To determine what was wrong with the satellite, the creators studied the data from Dwingeloo. It was found that, although the signal level was much too weak, many parts of the satellite were functioning properly. The most plausible explanation for the weak signal is that the antennas did not deploy correctly.
• Unfortunately, we can no longer hear the satellite even with the Dwingeloo Telescope: the first observation where we detected nothing was on July 22 at 17:00. It seems that between July 21 and 22, the satellite was switched off.
• Besides the Dwingeloo Telescope, no one else has detected this satellite, making the seven observations from the Dwingeloo Telescope extremely important for the creators. The Dwingeloo observations also show which of the Ariane 6 cubesats is Curium One, so that the team can track the correct satellite in future observations.
• All observations can be viewed on SatNogs. The high resolution image shows the received data packages, each 0.1 seconds long.

• 3CAT-4
• Curium One
• GRBBeta
• ISTSat-1
• Replicator
• ROBUSTA 3A
• CURIE A
• CURIE B