CSUCA

More than 60 years ago, the space race started with the launch of the Sputnik satellite, which beamed its radio messages from Space to Earth. Since that pioneering epoch, the space domain has slowly shifted from military to institutional actors, and more recently from institutional to private actors. This shift, usually called the “New Space era”, is accompanied by standardization, miniaturization, and a decrease of the cost of access to space. The present time offers more opportunities than ever, especially for universities, to train students in the aerospace context and its associated techniques.

In that framework, we have launched the CSU project in 2017. Its objectives are two-fold. A first goal is to design a nanosatellite of “CubeSat” format, called “Nice Cube”, at Université Côte d’Azur, to monitor and hence better understand the perturbations that affect optical links between satellites and ground stations. Those perturbations (atmospheric turbulence, aerosols, etc.) can indeed dramatically affect communication systems in the optical domain. A second specification of this project is that this new Nice Cube nanosatellite is entirely built by students, in order to train them to the New Space era technologies. Over the first two years of the project, 25 students of master level and various nationalities have already been involved in the Nice Cube satellite design. The construction of the instrument is progressing satisfactorily. As a matter of fact, Nice Cube is already at the end of “phase 0”, meaning that its dimensioning and agenda of forthcoming missions are well achieved. The nanosatellite will eventually host an optical communication payload that will allow the measurement of atmospheric perturbations. Meanwhile, we have also made progress on designing two associated ground stations, one operating in radio waves, and the other in optical.