2024 Volume 2 Article ID: 215
On December 12, 2018, JAXA announced that KOSEN-1 2-U CubeSat was selected as one of the themes for the Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration-2. This CubeSat is officially called Jupiter radio observation technology demonstration satellite. The CubeSat includes three key technologies to (1) demonstrate a high-accuracy attitude control system via the dual reaction wheel (DRW), (2) utilize an on-board computer with a Linux microcomputer board (Raspberry Pi Compute Module 1), and (3) deploy a 6.6-m long dipole antenna from the CubeSat for Jupiter radio observations. On November 9, 2021, KOSEN-1 was successfully launched by a JAXA Epsilon-5 Launch Vehicle and released in a low-Earth orbit. On the same day, the first continuous wave from KOSEN-1 was captured by ground stations, and five days later, the frequency modulation packet communications between the CubeSat and ground-tracking stations were confirmed. Since its launch, KOSEN-1 has been operated with seven college-based ground-tracking stations in Japan. After we checked out the satellite’s onboard equipment, the attitude detection system with the camera system and the DRW attitude control system have been successfully used in space. Through the KOSEN-1 operation over 1 year, we have performed several control commands. In this paper, we report a summary of our one-year operation results.
