Delfi-PRISM Spacecraft

Educational mission to demonstrate new bus and a series of payloads.

First goal is provide practical end-to-end education on space system, starting from mission design all the way to satellite operations. Students at the Delft University of Technology have been involved in this mission as part of their BSc, MSc and PhD curricula, working on multiple parts of the mission.

The second goal of the mission is demonstrating key upgrades to the heritage design from the Delfi-PQ mission (launched in 2022) to demonstrate an improved satellite bus, providing more energy and performances to the payloads, validating models and simulations developed by the students in Delft.

A third mission objective is demonstrating a series of payload, developed by students and researchers in Delft), including:

1. RAMaS: the Radio Amateur Mailbox in Space is a digital repeater for amateur operations capable of repeating ground messages instantaneously or after a pre-determined time delay, acting as an orbiting mailbox to extent the reach of traditional digipeaters. The instrument allows ground users to specify a message to be repeated freely, going beyond traditional text-only messages.
2. SALIS: the Satellite Attitude Lab In Space is an attitude control board designed to provide a flexible platform for students to demonstrate attitude control algorithms (developed as part of their course work at TU Delft) in space
3. STAR: the Space Traffic Avoidance Receiver is a GNSS receiver capable of performing in-space orbit determination and delivering orbital elements to the ground without human intervention to demonstrate Space Traffic Management capabilities and help operators on the ground tracking the satellite, also including an array of laser retro-reflectors for validation and passive tracking.
4. RM:the Radiation Monitor to measure the Total Ionizing Dose experienced by the satellite in orbit and validate current radiation models.
5. LMCOOL: the Life Marker Chip (Origin Of Life) is a small photonic chip and its readout electronics to eventually detect signs or primordial life on other celestial bodies. The payload aims at demonstrating the performances stability of the instrument when no biomarker sample is present.
6. RABSII: the Radio Amateur Beacon for the Investigation of the Ionosphere is a beacon in the 10m band used to detect from the ground the presence of sporadic-E using radio-amateur receivers.
7. OASIS: the Optical Attitude Sensing in Space experiment uses a set of infrared imaging sensors to determine the satellite attitude by tracking the Earth in sunlight and eclipse and the Sun.
8. DIANA: a payload to demonstrate the resilience of Graphene-based transistors to space environment. Transistor measurements will be carried out in space to assess the effectiveness of a passivation layer developed to allow sensing using such transistors in the harsh space environment.

Is Delfi-Twins still being developed or was it reworked into Delfi-PRISM?