BayKoSM

Feasibility study for a nanosatellite mission

As part of the Bavarian joint project BayKoSM (Bavarian Competencies for Swarm Missions), a feasibility study for a nanosatellite mission to test on-board image processing technologies for autonomous mission planning was carried out at the Chair of Computer Science 8.

The study was integrated as an image processing component of BayKoSM in a joint project of the Bavarian State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology and was funded for a period of eight months.

The project began with the definition of possible application scenarios that require the use of camera systems and the evaluation of the recorded image data directly with on-board equipment instead of on the ground. These include, for example, the independent identification of suitable landing sites on foreign celestial bodies (e.g. asteroids, comets, moons or planets) or the detection of scientifically interesting phenomena from space (e.g. weather events of all kinds, meteorites entering the atmosphere, processes on the sun, deep space observation).

Requirements for a nanosatellite mission were derived from the representative mission scenarios and the feasibility of the mission was then investigated. Realistic experiments with video simulations were carried out to better assess the performance requirements of image processing on the nanosatellite.

The results of the study are being used as the basis for the software simulation of a nanosatellite as part of the ADIA project..