The Design and Development of the Electrical Power System for the LightCube 1U CubeSat

The LightCube mission is a CubeSat whose goal is to allow users to manually flash a light that is observable by the naked eye. LightCube required the design of custom electronics because of its small size and unique mission. The majority of the volume of LightCube was taken up by the payload electronics, precluding any use of most off the shelf CubeSat components. A custom EPS system was designed and developed by students at ASU to meet all the power requirements of LightCube. The satellite’s solar panels were constrained to a 1U size and the batteries were given a limited volume. The EPS was architected with these constraints in mind to optimize for the space given. It consists of a charging circuit, two converters, voltage and current measuring circuits, and a separate battery board which includes a battery fuel gauge, current sensor, inhibit circuitry, temperature sensor, heater, and optional linear battery charger. One of the underlying goals of this design was to make the EPS and battery board as simple as possible. The design was intentionally simple and left out other features such as a microcontroller for ease and speed of development as well as minimize complexity to lower the risk of catastrophic failure due to radiation or other space events.