IISER MOHALI

The space industry is undergoing a paradigm shift globally and within India. In this evolving landscape, there are numerous opportunities to launch small satellites. Small payloads for astronomy are designed to address specific scientific cases that are not feasible with larger, sensitive missions. The development of these payloads often leads to innovations that tackle technological challenges. This set of three lectures covers various aspects of payload design, development, space flight qualification, mission planning, and operations.

Lecture 1: Fundamentals of Small Payloads for Astronomy I will discuss a few science cases that can be achieved with small payloads on CubeSat platforms and how the design philosophy differs from large space missions. I will also cover development strategy, mission planning, and project management aspects.

Lecture 2: CubeSat Missions: Development and Operations In this lecture, I will cover various aspects of building a payload and its qualification for space flight. We will discuss the design and development of subsystems, flight requirements, payload qualification for space flight, and operations.

Lecture 3: Small Payloads Development at IIA The Small/Space Payloads group at IIA is developing UV astronomy instruments suitable for short-term (1-2 years) missions on CubeSat platforms. In this talk, I will discuss the UV astronomy payloads being developed by our group and a few innovative subsystems for low-cost small payloads.

About the Speaker: Rekhesh is a scientist/astronomer at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. He was a graduate student at RRI, Bangalore. His doctoral thesis was based on radio observations using the giant meter wave radio telescope (GMRT), operated by NCRA-TIFR. Rekhesh joined IIA as a postdoctoral fellow in 2005 and later obtained a permanent position at the institute. He has more than 15 years of experience in space astronomy and instrumentation. He is currently leading the small/space payloads group at IIA, developing low-cost payloads and subsystems for UV astronomy. An experimental low-cost star sensor built by his team had its first flight on PSLV-C55 in April 2023.