PixelSat I
Project Pixel Orbital is a fully student-led team at Stanford Online High School building PixelSat I, a 3U CubeSat targeting launch into sun-synchronous low Earth orbit in early 2027, from scratch, on an extremely limited budget.
Form factor
IMU, magnetometer, and sun sensor readings are merged and fused using an Extended Kalman Filter to estimate the spacecraft's attitude (orientation). Hand-wound magnetorquers are driven through a PID controller to set the satellite's angular velocity and orientation.
Our battery pack is a 7.4V lithium-ion battery pack powered by high-efficiency solar panels. The satellite runs on a 3.3V bus regulated by a custom power controller, with other (higher voltage) dedicated buses for the communications system and the magnetorquers.
A STM32-series processor running the RTIC framework handles all onboard operations on a single core. All code is no_std Rust. We have a Raspberry Pi Zero coprocessor for camera operations, science experiments, and doom.
Our dual-band communications system uses LoRa UHF at 435 MHz alongside S-band at 2.4 GHz. The UHF transceiver is an E-Byte LoRa module built around a Semtech SX1262 chip and connected to a tape-measure antenna that deploys in orbit via a burn wire, and we are using novel patch antenna technologies for the S-band antenna.