APSCO CubeSat: 3U Mission

A full-stack 3U CubeSat developed for the APSCO Student Small Satellite Competition, with every subsystem owned in-house from the EPS and OBC up to the ground station and orbital simulation.

Mission & Role

APSCO's Student Small Satellite Competition asks teams to design, build, and demonstrate a complete CubeSat. Our group, the BD-BRACU Mavericks at BRAC University, took that as a chance to put every subsystem in the hands of student engineers.

As team lead, my work cut across mechanical, electrical, and software layers, keeping the subsystem leads aligned, owning the integration plan, and standing in for whichever board was under pressure that week.

Form Factor	3U CubeSat
Role	Team Lead
Team	BD-BRACU Mavericks
Competition	APSCO Student Small Satellite Competition
Result	2nd Runner-Up (2024)

Bus Architecture

All nine subsystems were designed in-house:

• EPS (Electrical Power System): Solar harvesting, battery management, and regulated rails sized against the orbit power budget.
• OBC (On-Board Computer): Microcontroller-based flight computer for scheduling, telemetry, and command decoding under tight resource constraints.
• COM (Communications): UHF/VHF radio link to the ground station, framed for low-data-rate beaconing and reliable long-distance reception.
• ADCS (Attitude Determination & Control): Sensor fusion (IMU + sun sensor) and control law for nadir-pointing, sized for the satellite's moment of inertia.
• ANT (Antenna): Deployable antenna design and integration; pattern and gain validated against the link budget.
• GS (Ground Station): Tracking, Doppler correction, and decoded telemetry, closing the loop between satellite and operators.
• STR (Structure): 3U mechanical design in SOLIDWORKS with mass budget, thermal mounts, and CubeSat-spec rail tolerances.
• SIM (Orbital Simulation): Pass timing, eclipse fraction, and contact windows to drive duty-cycle and thermal planning.
• PYL (Payload): Image-processing pipeline planned around the downlink budget.

Lessons Taken Away

• Systems thinking: A CubeSat exposes every constraint a real spacecraft has (power, link, thermal, mass) in miniature. Subsystem-spanning trade-offs become daily decisions.
• Leading engineers: Aligning eight subsystem leads, managing the integration schedule, and carrying integration risk taught me what technical leadership actually looks like in practice.
• Hardware discipline: PCBs ship, boards die, schedules slip. Building under a competition deadline forced rigour around revision control, test fixtures, and integration procedures.
• RF communications: Ground-station design, link budgeting, and the amateur-radio licence that came with it have stayed useful well beyond the project.