The main objective of the Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative is to create a network of students, educational institutions and organisations across Europe in order to design, construct and launch micro satellites and other spacecraft. This, by nature, distributed task can be handled by using available internet tools.

This objective is reached when a spacecraft is designed, built and launched by a significant number of European students in a highly distributed way. The completion of this project objective is independent of a mission success or failure.

The complexity of this task leads to a necessary kind of missions to reach the goal by the participating students and professors with the support of the European Space Agency and Arianespace. The missions are part of a layered structure that could lead to a Moon landing and are defined as follows:

Mission 0:
SSETI Express was launched into a Low Earth Orbit in October 2005. The satellite served as a technological demonstration and as a test bed for some of the hardware that will be used for ESEO.

Mission 1:
The European Student Earth Orbiter (ESEO) should be launched directly into an geo-stationary transfer orbit using an Ariane 5 launch vehicle, the launch is planned for the end of 2008.

Mission 2:
The European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) is at the moment, June 2006, approaching the feasibility study. If ESMO is found feasible a possible launch would be planned for 2011.

Mission 3:
The next step, after a possible Moon orbiter, would be a Moon lander mission, i.e. to land a Moon Rover that would would explore the Moon.

Giorno 3/9/2010

Nessun programma

Rome's team is composed by:

Energetics System Engineers: This role is shared between Cinzia Taccoli and Gianluca Curti. The teams referring to the Energetic Engineer are that of Chemical propulsion, Electrical propulsion,EPS and temporarely also the structural teams. The main roles of the Energetic Engineer are:

• overall management of engineering activities
• planning the engineering activities
• production and maintenance of the project engineering data base
• definition of rules for the control and exchange of engineering data within the project
• management of external and internal systems interfaces
• a set of maintained system budgets, utilizing a margin strategy which is coherent at all levels
• collation of the engineering inputs to the risk assessment and management process

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Ground Segment System Engineers: The role that Ground Segment Engineers, Giulio Mezzana and Roberto Dell'Ariccia (Master Degree graduating students in Telecommunications Engineering), are covering within the System Engineering Team is quite wide. In general, their main tasks are:

• converting mission requirements into Ground Segment system requirements
• reporting critical aspects of Ground Segment design to the system level
• producing with Ground Segment subsystems the required system-level documentation
• reliable communication channel between ESMO and Ground Stations for TTC
• planning Mission Operations in both chemical and electrical propulsion options
• defining the kind of Ground Segment that ESMO requires

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Ground Segment team: The ground segment team is responsible to locate and survey any possible ground stations and guarantee the link between the satellite and the Earth. In addition to this, the GS team has to handle the signal once its's received by the ground station and provide to elaborate and forward via software the elaborated beacon to the others subsystem depending on different demands.

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Radiometer team: The MiWaRS payload, selected as a backup payload by SSETI at this stage, is thought to be a relatively light and simple instrument exploiting the feature of being substantially a low-noise receiver.

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Thermal Control Team: The Thermal Control Design is mandatory to the Mission Success, since from it depend both the well-being and the correct operation of the devices / subsystems. The Team has the task to assure the thermal balance of the satellite, considering all the several heat fluxes and their evolution during the different phases of the mission:

• Sun heat flux
• Earth/Moon heat flux
• Earth/Moon albedo
• Thermal dissipation and requirements of equipments and subsystems
• Radiation exchange between external surfaces of spacecraft and deep space

Therefore, the thermal control subsystem is different for every spacecraft. Mission constraints, mission objective and the physical design of a spacecraft determines the inputs and outputs of the TCS interface.

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Flight Dynamics Team: Coming soon