Miniflex Satellite Concept for Precursor and Commercial Missions

Abstract

An upward trend in the development of microsatellites has been observed during the past few years mainly due to lower development and production costs and the wide range of applications. In order to assure technology know how for future missions Astrium GmbH has developed a MiniFlex Satellite Concept in the class from 80 kg to 250 kg derived from the Flexbus philosophy. The MiniFlex Satellite System is a modular concept that enables the design and manufacturing of "tailor made" solutions for specific missions, technically based on a reference architecture and a fixed set of recurring hardware elements (core elements). The classical subsystem or unit level design has been broken down to fuctional block levels (PCB´s). Potential fields of application are precursur missions in the field of constellation/formation flying, inter-satellite communication, verification of distributed system functions and on-board autonomy. This paper outlines the major features of the MiniFlex Satellite and describes an application example.