A PROVES Kit Overview
The PROVES Kit blends Open-Source Hardware and Software. The Hardware developed includes the entire educational satellite structure, brackets, and printed circuit boards. One of the major issues that we sought to solve with the kit was to develop a single solution for an end to end space mission engineering education. Many other open source projects avalible to the community only feature a single element, like just a radio or just a flight computer.
Figure 1: The Yearling-2 Satellite
Flight Heritage
In order to ensure that the educational experience provided by using a PROVES Kit here on Earth is as authentic as possible we strove to fly it in outer space and verify that something can indeed be built with a BOM cost of less than $1k and do all of the core functions of a satellite.
Pleiades - Yearling: The Chaotic First Attempt
We began this process with Pleiades - Yearling, which was conceived in Feburary 2022 as the brain child of Michael Pham and Megan Beck. This satellite was hot on the heels of BroncoSat-1 and, inspired by our friends at PSAS, we first tried to use a modular backplane solution that we were going to call the Lovelace Architecture.
FiFi for PROVES x Ember
Technically, the first flight of the PROVES kit was actually not to orbit, but on the Bronco Space Balloon Launch Vehicle! On the third official flight of the Bronco Space BLV (aptly named Cube Your Enthusiasm) a stripped down Yearling took to the skies in order to assist the fledgling Bronco Ember team in figuring out whether or not their chosen stepper motor would perform at 100,000ft.
Check out the post flight analysis here:
With a graceous endowment from our benefactor, Mike Beckage, we purchased a commerical rideshare opportunity for a 1U CubeSat and looked to the skies for the first journey of the PROVES Kit. Unfortunately a fully modular backplane system proved to be too complicated for us to finish developing in few short months we had from signing the launch contract to launch day. As a result, we did a massive rescope and brought back the PyCubed architecture (at the time in newly minted V5 form!) to pilot our ultra-low cost satellite.
The Yearling Mega Breadboard
We didn't really have a whole lot of money to play with or deep engineering talent to pull it off, so we went as cheap and simple as possible. This manifested in even going as far as soldering Adafruit sensor breakout boards to every face of the satellite to try and save as much engineering effort as possible!
Pleiades - Yearling was launched in January 2023 alongside Sapling - Sempervirens from the Stanford Student Space Initiative. Despite successfully reaching orbit, the orbital transfer vehicle that we were hosted on suffered a critical systems failure after separating from the Falcon 9. As a result, the satellite was never deployed and is now stuck orbiting the Earth in its deployer pod.
Figure 2: Yearling 1 Being Loaded into the Deployer (Credit: Launcher Space)
Pleiades - Yearling 2: The Unexpected Second Try
We never expected Yearling 1 to be Yearling 1. Kind of like how they didn't expect it to be World War I. Yearling 2 came very shortly after Yearling 1 was pronounced dead by failure of the deployment vehicle. We began R&D into an entirely new generation of the PROVES Kit on January 25, 2023 and had a completed Version 2 of the kit completed and qualified for spaceflight by March 1, 2023. This satellite went through two complete design iterations in that time and rolled in a significant amount of improvements over the Yearling 1 architecture.
The Hunt for Red Sapling
One of the more interesting side chapters of the Yearling arc was a span of approximately one week in which we thought it was possible that Sapling - Sempervirens had slipped out from the confines of its orbital prison and was faintly transmitting from orbit!
Figure 3: The Launch of Yearling 2 (Credit: SpaceX)
This satellite was launched on April 8th, 2024, and contact was successfully made through the TinyGS network just 7 minutes after deployment. Unfortunately, contact was soon lost with the satellite before it could be transitioned into its amateur radio mission. Valuable experience and validation of our ultra-low-cost satellite thesis was nonetheless gained.
Figure 4: The First Packet From Yearling 2!
Pleiades - Squared: Third Time's the Charm!
Due to the early loss of Pleaides - Yearling 2, our plan was to spend many months ironning out potential issues with the kit before attempting another spaceflight. This plan was totally cooked at the last minute though, when just a couple weeks after the launch of Yearling 2 we needed to do an emergancy delivery of a 1U satellite for a use it or lose it launch slot.
The Journey of Pleiades - Squared
This satellite was built, tested, and delivered for launch in only 1 calendar week. In order to get this done we did a rapid rebuild of the Yearling-2 engineering model to become SN11. The main updates from the SN10 that flew in April and this satellite were some small updates to the software, adding new redundant electrical connections, along with some additional glue and conformal coating of the boards.
This satellite was launched on June 12, 2024. Due to an unexpectedly early deployment from the host vehicle the satellite was actually lost in space for the first 5 hours of its mission life. Through a herculean emergency ground station effort from the amateur radio community though, contact was established and valuable mission telemetry was downlinked. This satellite unfortunately also suffered an early loss, but we were able to collect enough mission data to validate all of the core spacecraft systems.
Figure 5: The Pleaides - Squared Satellite Right Before Integration!
Pleiades - Orpheus: Going Upstream
Scheduled to launch in Fall 2024, Pleiades - Orpheus will be the launch of a PROVES Kit based satellite from the Irvington High School Girls in STEM Club! Funded by the gracious donations of Christie English, the Orhpeus project will be a trail of flowing the educational potential of the PROVES Kit upstream to a group of students from a public highschool in Fremont, California.
The Pleiades Five: This is Getting Out of Hand
Now there are six of them! With its very confusing name, the Pleiades Five mission is tasked with taking six 1U CubeSats to orbit from five different colleges and universities (not including the lead, Cal Poly Pomona). This mission was selected in the 2024 round of NASA's CubeSat Launch Initative (CSLI).