This independent study documents my work on the Texas State University Space Lab software development team for the university's first satellite mission, Pleiades Maia. Feel free to check out the report and presentation encompassed in this github to learn more about my and my team's contributions to the open-source, multi-institutional small satellite development project, Pleiades 5!
I joined Texas State University’s Space Lab software development team in September 2024 for the university’s first satellite mission, Pleiades Maia. Pleiades is an open-source, collaborative project between six universities that aims to construct, communicate with, and control small, Earth-orbiting satellites with more accessible and cost-effective embedded measuring devices. The long-term goal is to combine extensive documentation, software tools, and small satellite engineering materials into an educational kit. We hope that our contributions to the Pleiades project will help to cultivate an educational tool and community that enables high schools and colleges without established space labs to gain hands-on experience with space mission development, satellite development, and a finished, space-ready satellite in a matter of months. I have been working alongside six other undergraduate students to build upon and enhance a Python-based open-source flight software called PROVES (Pleiades Rapid Orbital Verification Experimental System) Kit CircuitPy. Due to the collaborative and exploratory nature of the project, our tasks have been incredibly varied. Our team’s contributions to the CircuitPy ProvesKit software include: infrastructure and tooling development, advancing of architecture and code quality, testing, firmware and embedded functionality development, programmatic shifts and strategic decision making, ground systems and communications, and project outreach. My major contributions this semester have been introducing PyTest unit tests to the code base to validate software functionalities, refactoring non-volatile memory (NVM) usage for storage of important flags beyond satellite reset, and readapting old SD Card functionality code into our current repo for file system development [10]. My next tasks will be finishing generating thorough and expansive documentation for our code base, and designing live data presentations for our developing ground station software.
