ESA’s first-of-its-kind research CubeSat, OPS-SAT, will come to an end tomorrow after almost five years in orbit. We currently expect the mission to complete its atmospheric reentry within a few hours of 16:00 UTC, 22 May 2024.
Teams from ESA and the organisations running the final experiments on OPS-SAT are currently wrestling against the laws of physics as increasing atmospheric drag threatens to steal away control of the spacecraft at any moment. They are working night and day to wrap up the mission’s final activities and doing their very best to squeeze out the final drops of science and technology return.
The University of Oxford, UK, and University of Stuttgart, Germany, successfully completed experiments in the last few days, but others continue even now.
“As the satellite has descended through the upper atmosphere, it has become harder to control. The OPS-SAT Mission Control Team and the teams from our experimenters have all worked long hours, including evenings, holidays and weekends to close out as many of the remaining experiments as possible before the end.
I am particularly happy to see us complete the experiment from Protostar Labs. It involved in-flight reconfiguration of the on-board Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), which is normally regarded as a high-risk procedure. However, they pulled it off with just 48 hours left on the mission clock!
It is also a perfect example of an OPS-SAT experiment and a suitable send-off to the mission. OPS-SAT is all about lowering barriers and providing access to space for new entities. Protostar Labs are a NewSpace company from Croatia, a nation with a young space industry, and are exactly the kind of team that OPS-SAT was developed to support.”
— David Evans, OPS-SAT Space Lab manager at ESA
“The opportunity to run our code in space marks a significant milestone for us as a Croatian company. We hope that this achievement will inspire others to persist in their efforts and see that it is possible to achieve things that may seem impossible, as well as position us at the forefront of the space industry in Croatia.
We would like to extend our thanks to every member of the OPS-SAT team who enabled us to conclude the experiment even though the satellite started deorbiting a few months ago. The OPS-SAT team has spent many hours in the past two months, working tirelessly to keep the satellite operational as long as possible, all the while providing us with support during the development and deployment of the experiment.
We look forward to future opportunities to continue testing our ideas and push the boundaries. Although this marks the end of the OPS-SAT satellite mission, we hope that our achievement will spark interest and be a driving force for the future Croatian space industry.”
— Protostar Labs team
“On 20 May, researchers from the Systems Security Lab, University of Oxford executed an experiment on OPS-SAT to explore the effectiveness of the increasingly prevalent QUIC transport protocol when communicating with satellites.
The results obtained have critical value to this research and stand as the defining achievement of the project. For this, the Systems Security Lab profusely thank the OPS-SAT team for their dedication to the OPS-SAT mission and their ability to maintain the functionality of the satellite under such adverse conditions.”
— Systems Security Lab, University of Oxford
“The OPS-SAT experiment was an ideal opportunity for us to test a Rust library we are working on to make writing flight software easier. Our experiment shows that it is absolutely possible to use Rust for flight software and that this has a lot of potential to boost productivity and quality for this process.
We would like to thank the operations team of OPS-SAT which was extremely supportive for the testing and validation of software on both the flatsat and the flying satellite and which also spared no effort to make all the experiments work even in the last hours of the mission.”
— Institut für Raumfahrtsysteme, University of Stuttgart
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