Good progress is being made on the technical reports and some important design decisions have been made. Shahzad has come up with the preliminary structural design and Alex has designed the ADCS. It is likely that the ADCS will be able to be built 'in house' which will clearly reduce development costs. The structural design of the platform that Shahzad has selected is referred to as a 'double mono-block', (where the cube is cut in half along its diagonal). This allows for a flexible modular design.

In other developments, work is continuing into the electronics requirements of the satellite. The possibility of using a linux based architecture is being explored. 

The project team has arranged to meet on thursday 18th December to review all technical reports completed to date before they have to be submitted on the 19th. 

Work is developing on a 'synopsis' page that describes the KUbeSat programme and platform. This is in support of generating funding in the new year from local businesses and industry.

Technical reports will continue to be written into the new year before more in depth design decisions can be made.

5th December Update

This week has been somewhat busy, the initial technical reports are coming along well. Discussion were held to extend the deadline for these reports as other external factors has caused a work build up has become unfeasible to compile the technical reports to a high standard. On the 19th December a report will be submitted by each member of the team concerning their designated subsystem. This two week extension should give all engineers ample time to fulfill the necessary requirements.

The second technical reports have been pushed back to have a deadline of the 6th of January, by doing this it has given the team some breathing space to rpoduce high quality work.

The local funding research, which had been designated to Chris Blower has been put on hold as a data pack needs to be distributed to the potential sponsor along with the covering letter. As neither of these generic products have been generated yet, no external contact has been made. The flyer is due to be contructed during the month of december, running parallel with the other tasks set within the group. Contact to these companies will commence in early January.

Due to absences the Logo and Mission patch are yet to be completed and due to be finished by next weeks meeting.

Research concerning gaining an amateur radio license for the university is currently being undertaken and information identified concerning the requirements will be stated at next weeks meeting.

This week a meeting was held with Gordana Collier, an electronics expert based at Kingston University concerning the flight module which would be on board the KEbeSat during its orbital mission. From the discussion a potential funding was avaliable for the engineers to gain for the KUbeSat, however as the project is still within the early stages, the team was unable to give a fully defined specification of requirements for this module. Research into this is still being undertaken at a relatively high level. In depth information will need to be collected and understood fully prior or ordering any components as at a price of $1200 at time, no room is avaliable for ordering incorrect components.

Overall this week has been productive and the project is moving the right direction. No new actions were identified and the main alterations to the project was the teams agreed deadline dates for the Technical Reports.

That's all for this week.

Regards KUbeSat Team