Development of cubesats in an educational context

For the last decade development and construction of student cubesat satellites has played an important part in the engineering Master Program within Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark. Due to the extend of such projects, it is important to focus on keeping the students interested and active within the satellite projects, and keep them engaged until the end of the project. This paper focuses on benefits as well as pitfalls in the process of students developing and operating their own satellite as part of their education. Finally, a comparison is made between the two most recent AAU satellites, the AAUSAT-II and AAUSAT3, which serves to illustrate, that setting the students free, can result in radical new ways of designing satellites.