VHF Beacon Development, Ground Segment, and Operations for CanX Missions

The versatile Generic Nanosatellite Bus (GNB) technology fused with the Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment (CanX) missions is pioneered by the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) at University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. Microspace philosophy has been employed at SFL to develop low cost nanosatellites with emerging technologies for education and research. This thesis provides an insight to the space systems engineering experience acquired by the author being a master’s student at SFL. This thesis describes the design, construction and testing of the VHF beacon transmitter for GNB. The umbilical Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) designed and built by the author is presented in this thesis. The assembly, integration and testing of the SFL ground station for the CanX missions has been explored. The on-orbit spacecraft operations for CanX-2 and NTS, from the launch campaign to the commissioning phase to nominal operations along with the anomalies faced and the contingency operations carried out by the author to date have been explained in detail in this thesis.MAS