SatLight

Abstract

A rapidly expanding market for Cubesats encourages companies to explore business opportunities by innovating new solutions for use on small satellites. Cubesat is aimed to be modular and easily accessible for any who want to launch satellites into space. Cubesats larger than 8U has never been launched before, and even though these are still small satellites, they may require a more reliable power source than normally accessible on a conventional Cubesat. En-gineering a solution for power collection and transfer has for larger satellites traditionally been tailored for each different satellite. Since Cubesat is aiming to standardize components, there may be a demand for a power transfer system for Cubesats larger than 8U when these become the norm. This report discusses a solution to a Solar Array Drive Mechanism for Cubesats as a plug-and-play solution, including power transfer and test bench.