Six years in the making

The fully-assembled ULg's 'CubeSat' flight model is the result of a period of development that lasted more than six years and involved around fifty students (see their photos at http://www.oufti.ulg.ac.be/), as well as ten professors and engineers. OUFTI-1 benefited from funding from Belspo (Belgian Scientific Policy), through the Prodex programme, and from the University of Liège for the purchase of items (such as the Cubesat structure), the development of components (including electronic cards, entirely made in ULg), promotional activities, participation in international conferences, workshop at ESA, and internships in industry. A first lesson from this project, the first of its kind in Belgium, is emerging: developing a spacecraft, even a small one,  takes a lot of time, and requires a lot of good will, perseverance, patience, and efforts, in from the students and researchers who were discovering and learning about the challenges and constraints of space engineering.

'The idea of an original mission for a CubeSat made in ULg (and thus Liège!) was discussed on 18 September 2007 during a late-afternoon 45-minute telephone call with Luc Halbach, a passionate ham-radio operator and at that time an engineer at Spacebel, and I  made the decision to proceed right there, without any funding in sight' recalls Jacques Verly. A small-satellite initiative for Liège began in 2005 with the idea of the LEODIUM project (Lancement En Orbite de Démonstrations Innovantes d'une Université Multidisciplinaire) - from the Latin name for Liège - conceived within the Liège Espace association, a space think-tank bringing together the ULg laboratories and local companies with an interest for space science and technology. The development of a nanosatellite was conceived as an active teaching tool and a means of raising public awareness of educational tools available at the ULg in areospace engineering andspace science, two domains for which the ULg is a leader in the French community of Belgium. Yet, it was still necessary to find a project with an international reach and visibility. This is precisely what the OUFTI-1 acieved over the last six years.

An unprecedented mission for amateur-radio operators

OUFTI-1 aims to experiment in space with new D-STAR (Digital-Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio) protocol and technology. The community of amateur-radio ("ham") operators around the world is expecting great things from experiments with a D-STAR digital radio communications space relay between hams, featuring simultaneous voice and digital data transmission (GPS, files, etc.), and routing and 'roaming' around the world, including via the internet. Even though there was no need to stabilise the satellite around its three axes for this mission, it was necessary to miniaturise its telecommunications equipment, develop new components, optimise its electrical power supply, develop a robust and effective deployment system for the antennas, and increase reliability all round. All this without exceeding 1.3kg of mass at launch.

Another aspect of OUFTI-1 is its Liège dimension: learning about space systems requires cooperation between university engineers (ULg, UCL) and technical school engineers (Institut Gramme/HELMo, Electronics Department of HEPL/ISIL, HEPL/Rennequin Sualem-INPRES). The instigators and academic supervisors of the ULg/Liège 'CubeSat' have focussed on the 'by and for students' angle of the project.  This is why it took such a long time to develop, even with Amandine Denis as project manager to ensure a smooth transition between successive waves of students from one academic year to the next. The ULg's Montefiore Institute has already designed and constructed a satellite control station, which has been operational for several months. It is equipped with radio equipment capable of receiving signals from any ham radio satellite in orbit, and to send signal to satellite if required. In particular, this station was designed to send telecommands to OUFTI-1 (on its future orbit) and received telemetries from it. The ground-based OUFTI-1 radiocommunication system must still be augmented to integrate the OUFT-1 D-STAR system into the worldwide D-STAR network. In this regard, the ULg already installed, about five years ago, a D-STAR repeater connected to Internet, which was the first in Belgium and the fifth in Europe. The receivers and transmitters of this D-STAR repeater are located in the attic of the Control Center of the ULg and the antennas on its roof. In addition, for six years, masters and doctoral theses have been written on the miniaturisation and development of efficient components capable of withstanding the rigours of the space environment (differences in temperature, radiations) after launch (shocks, vibrations).