STUDSAT: India's first student Pico-satellite project

In the era of development of space technology, miniaturization plays a vital role in low cost small satellite missions. The versatile application capabilities and low cost of Pico/Nano satellites missions make them attractive for a wide scope of space exploration projects. This paper outlines the steps involved in design, development and fabrication of a Pico-satellite `STUDSAT': STUDent SATellite along with the development of ground station that is capable of communicating with STUDSAT. It elaborates upon the different subsystems in the satellite. The satellite falls in the category of pico satellites, where the mass of satellite is restricted to 1 Kg and volume to 1.1 liters. The overall dimension of the satellite is (10 × 10 × 13.5) cm. The satellite is capable of capturing images of ground resolution 90 meters at an altitude of 680 Kms. The STUDSAT was launched with ISRO's PSLV C-15 on 12th July 2010 as a secondary payload. Further, the paper elaborates on the beacon and telemetry data that were received from the satellite. The satellite mission was terminated officially after 3 months from its launch date. The paper also presents the analysis on failures that had caused early termination of STUDSAT mission.