New-Tech Europe Magazine | August 2016 | Digital edition

via a high-altitude weather balloon to an altitude of 30km in order to test its systems in a harsh environment where the ambient temperature dropped to lower than -50°C, prior to future rocket launches. WUSAT2 launched in 2015 carrying a spectroscopy payload to an altitude of 90km as part of the prestigious DLR/SNSB project REXUS (Rocket Experiment for University Students). For WUSAT 3, the ICARUS project, designed for deployment from the ISS in 2018, the team has opted for a three-unit design, effectively three CubeSats stacked on top of each other. At the top end of the device is a deployable antenna array, which will be the receiver for the ICARUS signals. (See figure 1) As mentioned at the top of this article, the small size and challenging operating conditions experienced in space applications require the electronic systems used to be extremely rugged. At launch, systems can be subject to several G shock forces, and when in orbit, temperatures can vary from very cold to extremely hot, depending on the position of the satellite relative to the sun. Electronic interconnection systems are especially vulnerable, since they must not only guarantee the integrity of the electrical signal, they also have a physical role to play. Size and weight are always determining issues in any space application: the smaller and lighter the components the greater the payload can be…and in a tiny nanosatellite, this becomes even more important. Then there is also the economic consideration. In space terms, Cubesats are relatively inexpensive. But they still cost thousands of pounds to develop and launch, and there is no opportunity to fix any problem once launched. Simply, the connectors must not fail. Since its inception WUSAT has chosen to use high reliability connectors from Harwin. The company uses a

Figure 1: The WUSAT 3 ICARUS project showing three CubeSats stacked on top of each other with a deployable antenna array

Figure 2. (a) Circuit simulation model and (b) Actual measurement vs. simulation.

Cubesat satellite, a nanosatellite, typically a cube 0.1m wide, with a mass

of less than 1.33kg. In April 2013, its first Cubesat (WUSAT1) was launched

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