Development of a 1U CubeSat as Part of a 3x1U Constellation

In the fall of 2016, the NASA Science Mission Directorate, working with the Virginia Space Grant Consortium, initiated the development of three 1U CubeSats by undergraduate students at universities representing the Commonwealth of Virginia. The University of Virginia, Old Dominion University, Virginia Tech, and Hampton University, were chosen to construct CubeSats for flight in May of 2018. The mission has three primary goals: to educate students by providing hands-on experience, to measure orbital decay on a constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, and to evaluate and demonstrate a system for the communication of relative and absolute spacecraft position. In this paper, we will describe the details of the mission itself, the science behind the mission, and the structure of the mission that was established to accomplish its goals. We will also provide a review of the hardware used by the mission, the software that exists so far, information about the thermal modelling of the CubeSats, the radio system, and environmental considerations. We hope that this paper will serve as a summary of the mission for those who are not familiar with it, as well as an internal document for describing what we have achieved by this stage of development