NIUSAT - NICHE STUDENT SATELLITE

On 26th December 2004, Tsunami struck the shores of India. It hit hard the shores of Southern India, especially Tamil Nadu, and Kanyakumari and the nearby places causing havoc hitherto unknown or never experienced by the people there. The devastation to life and property was shocking and terrifying. The impact of the Tsunami was acutely felt all over the country and the world. Loss of life was alarming. In the wake of the 2004 Tsunami, what became very clear was the lack of prediction measures of natural disasters before they struck.

The Chancellor of Noorul Islam University was acutely aware of the lack of prediction systems in Tamil Nadu and India of the devastating natural calamities like earthquakes, tsunami and floods. Therefore, an earnest investigation into the possibilities of prediction of natural calamities became

Niusat Structure

ANGULAR MOTION SIMULATOR

For HARDWARE IN LOOP (HILS) SIMULATION TEST

NIUSAT

INSIDE THERMO VACUUM CHAMBER FOR HIGH VACUUM AND THERMAL SIMULATION TEST a disturbing botheration with the institution. With such high goals as to protect the lives and properties and even infrastructure during natural disasters, the NICHE, ventured into building and launching a Nano Satellite into space with the support of space organizations and ISRO.

Niusat Features

NIUSAT is the first three axis stabilized nano satellite using indigenously developed sun sensors, micro reaction wheels and magnetic torquers and using imported MEMS three axis gyroscopes and Magneto Meters.

NIUSAT uses the indigenously developed 25 m resolution and 50 square km area and 3 band (RGB) multispectral camera.

Spot mode and continuous mode of imaging with jpeg 2000 compression and no compression options.

All main frame sub systems fully redundant to take care of any single point failure.

Four Micro Reaction Wheels with 30 mNms angular momentum capacity and 1.5 mNm torque in tetrahedral mounting and orthogonally mounted Magnetic Torquer coils as control actuators.

Control algorithms for detumbling mode, sun pointing mode, 3 axis stabilization mode and momentum dumping operations.

64 numbers programmable current limited MOSFET switches for sub system ON/OFF operations.

Main and Redundant Power Buses for power system redundancy, High performance dual core 32 bit e200 power architecture processor for On-Board Computing. FLASH MEMORY with ECC, 16GB storage flash for payload data, Supports I2C, CAN, SPI and UART ports

Solar arrays and the UHF & VHF antennae are stowed during launch and deployed after separation from the launch vehicle

10 Ah Li-ion battery for power storage, 40 W power generation using 4 numbers of deployable and sun tracking solar panels Multi junction solar cells based solar array Supports software timers and WDT

UHF band for Telemetry and VHF for Telecommand operations, Monopole Antenna for UHF/VHF Data Transmission and Reception, High gain patch antenna for S-band Transmitter

Solar Panel and Antennae hold down & Deployment Mechanisms, Passive & Active Thermal Control Systems

Industrial, Institutional and Academic Partners

Data Patterns

Chennai Dhruva Space Pvt Ltd, Bangalore

SONA College of Technology, Salem

OKA Basu, Thiruvananthapuram

Arya Electronics, Thiruvananthapuram

Alvar Metal Industries, Thiruvananthapuram

International Academic Partners

CANEUS International Inc.,

Canada Ryerson University, Canada