GASPACS

The Get Away Special Passive Attitude Control Satellite (GASPACS) was a 1U CubeSat created by Utah State University's Get Away Special undergraduate research team. I joined the team in Fall 2020 and was hired as a fellow in the Summer of 2021 to help complete the satellite.

Mission

The mission's primary objective was to deploy an inflatable boom in low Earth orbit and transmit a clear picture of it back. The mission's secondary objective was to determine the effectiveness of the boom in stabilizing the satellite.

Outcomes

GASPACS successfully completed both objectives. It transmitted multiple pictures alongside magnetometer data, showing that the inflatable boom passively stabilized the satellite.

Contributions

As a member of the software team I wrote driver and transmission protection software. This included ensuring that the satellite could continue to function even if any noncritical piece of hardware (such as a solar panel) failed. It also included software to ensure every entry into the transmission queue was formatted correctly, and erased (or dropped) in the case of data corruption. The GASPACS software is open-source and can be found here.

Alongside this, I performed unit tests and wrote code documentation.