ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

The Leonardo SPACESTAR product is going to be updated with the main goal of reducing size and mass (Mini Spacestar) while maintaining the same performance and flight heritage of a well consolidated product, with hundreds of units flying since many years. The Mini Spacestar updated electronics will be even more compact than before and still dedicated to APS control and image pre-processing, while a SW (delivered by Leonardo) embedded in the central AOCS computer will calculate the quaternions. As a result, the Mini Spacestar confirms the same architectural configuration of SPACESTAR, which already demonstrated to provide a significant reduction of recurring costs at AOCS level thanks to CPU resources sharing. The Mini Spacestar electrical I/F and data I/O will remain unchanged with respect to the predecessor, to allow replacing at zero cost in the platforms that already adopted this product. The Mini Spacestar will be available either with components fully space qualified (for missions with high reliability requirements), or in a configuration based on “New Space” components. The “NS” Mini Spacestar will provide adequate quality and resistance to radiations through components efficiently selected or locally shielded, at the same time allowing a significant reduction of recurring costs and meeting the requirements of the “New Space” Missions. Finally, thanks to its high performance and reduced dimensions, the Mini Spacestar is suitable to be integrated directly on the optical bench of observation payloads (e.g. Optical payloads) to increase System pointing (and geolocation) performances, where required. Studies are in progress at Leonardo and some highlights will be given as part of the paper.