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Aalto-1: A nanosatellite using Open Source

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 Yanes, Adrian

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Aalto-1: A nanosatellite using Open Source
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64
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In this talk we will present the system design and the software architecture that is going to be used in Aalto-1, the first Finnish nanosatellite project. The system is completely thought to use open source technologies, even in terms of hardware. This talk is a nice example about how creative, technology and open source philosophy can be combined to get complex artifact as a nanosatellite. In order to promote technological sciences and engineering careers among the young generation, Aalto University Department of Radio Science and Engineering has initiated a student satellite project. When launched, Aalto-1 will be the first Finnish satellite. The satellite project is a motivating and demanding goal for students and a highly visible project to promote technological sciences and Aalto University. This effort will join the forces of the university, from electronics to financial management, in a truly multidisciplinary manner. The Aalto-1 project started in the beginning of 2010, when a group of students made a feasibility study of the first Finnish satellite in the framework of the Space Technology special assignment course. Since then the project has created significant excitement among students and teachers alike. New teaching methods have been applied and a significant interdisciplinary co-operation network inside Aalto University has been created. This autumn, the student satellite team grew by 10 newcomers and has now members from five different departments of Aalto University, including arts and design. Additionally, a consortium of Finnish universities and space industry has been formed to support the satellite project and international relations with several foreign universities have been created. The first Finnish satellite project has already received media attention. The project has been cited in several television shows, including YLE science magazine "Prisma Studio", where the project was explored in detail. The satellite project is coordinated by Department of Radio Science and Engineering and supported by Space Technology teaching. In the project participate also Aalto University Department of Automation and Systems Technology, Department of Communications and Networking, Department of Applied Mechanics and addittionally Department of Physics of University of Helsinki (HY), Department of Physics and Astronomy of University of Turku (UTU), VTT, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Aboa Space Research Oy, Oxford Instruments Analytical Oy and other Finnish companies. The consortium will expand in the future.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
I am here to talk about Alto1, a nanosatellite using open source software, labor software. And, well, let's be a bit, the pointer is, okay, the pointer is only for the laser.
00:25
So from where I come and what I am doing. I come from Finland, I am not Finnish, for that reason I don't have a yellow hair, okay. But more or less I come from the Alto University. Alto University is the product of the merge of three universities in Finland. Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki School of Art of Design and the formerly Helsinki University of Technology.
00:44
With this new merge we got a new task. The task is to build the first Finnish satellite, okay. It's going to be a small satellite but the university got the task. We have some kind of consortium with a lot of companies involved. But mostly it's built by the students through baccalaureate thesis, master thesis, etc.
01:04
Currently in our project we have like 50 students involved from different levels, baccalaureate, master, PhD. And, of course, the payloads that for people that is not familiar with the concept of payloads in the satellites is like the important things in the satellite are built by external companies, laboratories, etc.
01:23
So, this is Alto One. This is how it should look in one year, okay. Right now we are in the preliminary design. We are taking all of these decisions about what it should do and in which way, okay. And we know at least that it's going to have this appearance because we are following some global standards to do this satellite.
01:43
I will talk in the next slide about this. But briefly, some points about the Alto One project, okay. Of course, if we are building this, it's not just too much hair for the microphone. It's not for fun only. We are building this because we have student objectives and also university objectives.
02:02
We try to educate better engineers. We try to promote the science, technology and the science knowledge in Finland. And we have a really nice goal that is launch the first Finnish satellite that always is some kind of incentive, really nice incentive, and more or less is trying to promote the research in this field, in a country as Finland, okay.
02:25
The standards that we are using in the satellite are based in the KUBASAR design specification. Maybe some of you are familiar with this specification. This specification comes from Stanford and California Polytechnic Institute. And more or less, they are telling us, when I say telling us,
02:43
telling to everyone that is interested in building a small satellite, how it should look, what is the maximum weight, what is the dimensions, et cetera. In our case, I guess that is the maximum dimensions. It's a 3U type. It means that it's going to be less than 4 kilograms, okay. And at the same time, we are trying to follow the FHC standards.
03:02
It's some kind of European standards for everything concerning a satellite. It's some kind of inside stuff that I guess that nobody is following completely, but they are giving us a lot of nice information. We will use an open source radio frequency, okay. It means that anyone that has a radio in their home that can synchronize with this frequency
03:24
could fetch the data from the satellite, as you can do right now with other satellites. And while we are testing all of, according with the standard space, et cetera. So this is a preliminary statement about how it's going to be internally, Alta-1, okay.
03:42
And we can see here, well, we can have the radio-subsistent communication, we have here the spectrometer, we have the S-band antenna, we have the batteries, but this is not telling you nothing about the satellite. More or less, I'm going to talk briefly about the payloads. We are going to send three payloads, okay, three important things,
04:03
that are an electro-plasma break, that is going to try to prove new measurements for the tether in the satellites. We are going to put a spectrometer that is going to send, is going to be also in a mission in Mercury in 2014. And we are going to put, no, we are going to put a radiation monitor, and the radiation monitor is going to be in this mission. And we are going to take all of this extensive data from them,
04:22
and we are going to send to the Earth, and we are going to put there for you, okay, and for people that is interested in this kind of data. And, well, in this satellite is going to be a mainboard computer, also called OVC, onboard computer. It's the computer in charge of taking care of all the things, the data and process to send to the Earth, whatever.
04:41
And I'm going to talk here about the software that we are going to use there. I'll give some small notes about what is going to be there and why. A small introduction about nanosatellites. Well, a nanosatellite, the name is telling you that it's small, okay? It's an embedded system. In this case, it's going to be more or less these dimensions, okay?
05:03
It's a delicate artifact. I guess it's obvious that we can go there and reboot it. It's something that is tricky right now. And it's using real-time data due to the payloads are, well, fetching the data in real-time, and it's more or less the point of this mission, try to get the data.
05:20
And, well, we don't have too much power because it's a small satellite, so the solar cells are going to be small, so everything is going to be very limited, so it's really complex. And it's really difficult to test because the space, if you don't know, I guess I do know, but it's a joke, is different than there, okay? We have vibration, we have radiation, et cetera.
05:41
And, well, the components that we are using there are not ready for this kind of environment, so it's a bit tricky to test. And normally it's expensive, really expensive, but this is our university and we don't care. We try to do it in a cheaper way and the best way and try our best. This is a general theme about the system design, okay? Here you can see the ground segment.
06:02
This is the segment that is going to be in the university. It's going to be the ground station, okay? And this is the satellite segment. We have here different subsystems, and this is the part that my team and me, we are in charge of design and implement, okay? The onboard computer. The onboard computer is going to take care about this spectrometer, data, radiation monitor,
06:20
electro-plasma break that, well, is going to be also manipulating it. At the same time, it's going to be in charge of the communication subsystem, the altitude determination and control system, et cetera. Here is more or less the interface control, some kind of draft, okay, who is going to be the information flowing around the system.
06:41
We are going to use the I2C protocol, or I2C subsystem, and we are going to fetch the data from here and we are going to protest in the onboard computer. But here comes. We are in an open source liberal software conference and we are going to talk about software. We need something simple and sensible. It's just obvious, okay? A satellite is something complex.
07:01
We can put windows there. So we need also something reliable. We can put windows here. Tiny but functional. I guess that we can put custom also because our payloads is something, we can consider that all the satellites have some kind of unique machines. Why? Because, well, all of them, they have a specific mission,
07:21
so we will need some specific software, homemade, of course. According with the specifications for payloads. And it should be thought to be working in the worst scenario because in the space everything can happen. It should be full tested and, of course, we should be, we should release everything. And this is something that I would like to remark. Right now we have a really, well, many, many, many satellites in the space.
07:45
And I will say that we don't know how work, any of them. We don't know what is happening there because we have all of these governmental agencies that, well, they try to be transparent and, well, they are getting something. But we don't know what is happening. And I guess that if we are trusting the satellites, if we are trusting the data, we should know also how the data is manipulated.
08:03
I mean, we are software guys, more of us. And we know that a small integer can modify a huge variable. So I guess that is something that we can, or we like to introduce in Alto1, that you should have the capability to check the software that is running there in your computer. Okay, this is how they are getting the radiation data.
08:21
This is how they are getting the spectrometer data. This is our objective, okay? So how we are going to do this? This is maybe something crazy for people that is in the same industry of the space technology. We are going to bet for the Linux kernel, applying real-time patches. The satellites should behave as real-time systems for different questions that is out of the scope.
08:42
The operating system is going to be a custom distribution. We are going to do something that you probably know. The payload software is going to be homemade. We don't know the language yet, but we will bet for C, C++, or assembler. The ground station is going to use Genio Radio and JPredit. JPredit is an application for tracking satellites. And the data distribution is going to be about
09:01
using public website or Genso. Genso is a project that is trying to coordinate all the ground stations around the world and try to interconnect them and then providing the data for everyone that is connected. It's a kind of, well, when you are tracking a satellite, the satellite is only visible for a couple of minutes. So if you don't have a ground station in every country or in every different latitude,
09:21
it's going to be really difficult to follow your satellite 24 hours. But with this kind of network, we will have the capability to set, for instance, to Brazil. Hey, Brazil, can you take a look at my satellite? Can you send these comments? It's something like that, the general idea. Well, the kernel is going to be highly customized. It's going to be really tiny. We don't know yet. As I said, we are in the preliminary design phase.
09:41
It's going to be focused for I2C, and it's going to be also really focused in processor scheduling, different priorities, as other operating systems in real time, maybe for 300 to 0 in terms of levels. It's going to use the real-time patches. Right now, the idea is to use open embedded task basement for the distro because maybe someone comes here and says,
10:01
why you don't create your own distro? Well, because we are doing a satellite. We have enough problems, okay? So we don't want to create our own distribution. Deterministic systems, something really important in satellites or I guess in all the embedded systems is that you should know the state of the system and how it's going to be if you perform an operation. And also, really important, the time that it's going to take. If I'm going to say to the satellite, please take me a photo,
10:21
I should know that in one minute it's going to be a photo. And if in one minute it's not a photo there, it's because something is wrong, okay? It's not behaving properly. So it should be deterministic, and this is a hell. Autonomous, it means that if for some reason we lost the communication, we did. We can say to the satellite, hey, please do this and this and this. Satellite should have the mechanism to know that, hey, I should perform these operations.
10:41
I should do this, this, and this, meanwhile, okay? Communications, we are having in mind the bus for inter-process communication, but maybe it's out of scope also to talk about this here. Payload software, tiny, simple, and reliable. Client-server architecture is going to behave in that way. That if the payload software, for instance, if the spectrometer goes down,
11:01
we turn off the software, and that is all. This is not like some operating system that you know that you plug a printer and then everything crash. No, we can allow that. We should have the capability to say, we don't need this software anymore. It's going to be designed to use in user space memory. It needs really isolated from the kernel. It should have the capability to crash the system and will be GPL.
11:22
Confirming the ground station, we are going to use GNU Linux. We are going to use GNU radio and custom software that, of course, also we will put a variable on the net. Give credit for real-time satellite tracking, connect to Jensen Network, collaborating with TESAN with other satellites, and the ground station will be in the church of the data publication.
11:40
And, of course, we'll be visitable. If you like a country like Finland with one method of snow, you are welcome, please, but come to visit us. And, finally, data distribution. How is it going to be the data? Well, normally, something that is funny in some of these projects is that when they fetch the data, they're using the papers and they don't put in the net. We will put a lot of work into the data for everyone.
12:01
Even if you don't have clue about what means a spectrometer, you should have the capability to have a feed file in your desktop and say to someone, hey, I have a spectrometer data. I don't know what it means, but I don't want it. Okay, this is the idea. A licensed, probably, public domain. We don't know yet. This is also a distribution through Jensen Project.
12:20
Maybe it's an API that you can check. We have one project as reference in the SSTL, the Stanford Project, that they are showing everything from the satellite and even they have the capability, or you have the capability to send a comment to the satellite and you enter in a queue and they deliver you the photo. It's really nice stuff. And, of course, the data distribution will be useful. So, this is the idea.
12:42
We are going to put a satellite there that is going to have open source, liberal software running. We will publish everything there and ideas, critics, suggestions, money for the project, whatever is welcome. Thank you for your time.
13:08
I have one minute according with the clock. So, some questions? Yeah, please. In the UK, the universities are quite spectacular with their IP. Is that the case in Finland? Or was it quite difficult to convince them
13:22
to allow them to make everything free? What do you mean with making free? Can you repeat the question? You are writing GPL software and releasing it under those licenses, rather than owning it by the universities? As far as I know, we don't have any problem with that. I should say that Finland is quite permissive with that.
13:40
As far as can you repeat the question? The question was something that if we are going to have some problem releasing the software because we come from a university. I don't think so. Remember that Linus was born in Finland. So, more questions? I have 50 seconds. Will you be able to upgrade your system in some way?
14:03
Yeah, actually, it's not like upgrade, like Windows Update or Ubuntu Packet Manager. Yes, we will have the capability to reflash the system. We will have the capability to send new software, as the Mars rover has. I mean, right now in... Okay. We will have that capability.
14:21
But the problem is that I didn't mention that because this goes really, really deep. Is that the radio bandwidth that we have is really, really small. So, we can perform some updates, but really, really small updates. Okay?