A probe of concept for femto-satellites based on commercial-of-the-shelf

Commercial-Of-The-Shelf is an adjective that describes software or hardware products that are ready-made and available for sale to the general public. These products were not designed initially for aerospace environment. Femto-satellites, a very promising new category of satellites, with a less than 100 grams mass. They are, by concept, low cost devices. A future application for femto-satellites could be to monitorize atmospheric properties, specially attractive if they are used in swarms, having simultaneous samples from different places at a time in the atmosphere. Other applications are educational purposes, testing of specific space components in true conditions and provide dynamic support for earthquakes. In this paper we present a probe of concept of femto-satellite based on Commercial-Of-The-Shelf that demonstrates that it is possible to build a low cost, low weight and good enought performance satellite-in-a-board. Technical issues and specifications for this femto-satellite developed by the WikiSat group will be also shown. WikiSat group is a contestant for the N-Prize. Constrains and mission requirements for this probe of concept were based in the N-Prize contest having long-range radio- communications, data acquisition, basic attitude control, inertial platform, power supply system and on-board computing system for less than 20 grams.