ESTCube-1 in-orbit experience and lessons learned

ESTCube-1 is a one-unit CubeSat launched on May 7, 2013 to a Sun-synchronous, 700 km, polar low Earth orbit. Its primary mission is to centrifugally deploy a tether as a part of the first in-orbit demonstration of electric solar wind sail (E-sail) technology. During 1.5 years in orbit the team has solved numerous challenges and the satellite bus was ready for the main experiment by September, 2014. The satellite has fully functioning electrical power system, communication system, as well as command and data handling system. The camera, developed to image the end-mass of the tether, has taken more than 230 images for PR purposes, for camera characterization, and for validating the attitude determination system. The attitude determination accuracy is better than 2°. Despite the internal magnetic field that aligns the satellite body with geomagnetic field, the team is able to spin up the satellite to more than one revolution per second around an axis that suits the E-sail experiment. In this seminar, the experiment design, an overview of the subsystems, the in-orbit experience and the lessons learned will be presented.