Intelligent optimisation of microsatellite on-board power systems

The Surrey Space Centre has pioneered the research and development of moder n microsatellites technologies over the last twenty years. Obviously, the s mall volume of these satellites places severe constrains on power available for applications payloads on board the satellite therefore many research p rojects at Surrey have been carried out to reduce power consumption of both satellite platform and payloads. This paper describes one of these projects which is the use of an automatic power scheduling algorithm for the PICOSAT mission, a micro-satellite deve loped by SSTL under contract to the USAF SSP (Small Satellite Programme). T he purpose of this algorithm is to predict the battery and memory levels on a short term basis and automatically schedule the on-board experiments act ivities in order to optimise the power and memory usage over the selected p eriod, meeting the constraints and requirements for the mission. The algori thm makes use of a recursive feedback loop to reach the optimum output. An initial prototype of the algorithm has been implemented using MATLAB and, o nce fully tested, it is intended to port and run it on the satellite On Boa rd Computer in orbit. The experiment priorities and payload characteristics are specified in separate modules, allowing the easy re-use and upgrade of the algorithm for different payload configurations under other SSTL satell ites. (C) 2000 International Astronautical Federation. Published by Elsevie r Science Ltd. All rights reserved.