IonSat Project

Student activities description

20/10/2021

IonSat team activities

The IonSat nanosatellite project is one the most ambitious student project at the Centre Spatial de l’École
Polytechnique (CSEP). The majority of the students involved in the project are second year students from
Ecole Polytechnique, who are taking part of the mandatory Projet Scientifique Collectif (PSC). Other
students working on IonSat are interns, from both Ecole Polytechnique and other universities.

The PSC objectives are to provide experience on a long-term project, the students themselves must learn
the importance of basic organization and discover the impact of human relations. The PSC takes place
during nine months (August to May). During this period of time, the students have assigned one complete
afternoon, usually Wednesday, to the activities related to the PSC. Every year, a different number of
students choose the IonSat project as the subject for their PSC. This year, 11 students from the X20 cohort
are working on IonSat. The students are divided in two groups for academic purposes, each group has a
student team leader who coordinates the activities and also helps in project management. Then the
groups are divided in thematic cells (pôles), where different roles are assigned to each student. Depending
on the amount of work that has been estimated for the different tasks, some students have two roles.
Currently there is also one intern that is working as part of the team.

Moniteur CSEP IonSat Project CSEP Technical

Manager Manager

Student team managers and systems engineer

Intern 1:
Kelyan Olichon OBC & Flight Software
Jerome Hui
Thomas Bras

Power and Thermal Telecoms Structure & Configuration

Amaury Autric Alexis Launois Thomas Bras
Jean-loup Lemoine Mohamed Ahmed Jules Sueiro

Attitude Control Orbit Control

Operations
Zayed Herma Jerome Hui
Victor Deroo
Mohamed Ahmed Hadir Taleb
Kelyan Olichon
Hadir Taleb
 IonSat Project
Student activities description
20/10/2021

The main key points during the participation of this year’s PSC are the following:

2021

• 25 - Aug : Kick-off PSC X20

• 24 - Sep : Detailed Proposition: a report sent to the Professors of École polytechnique
• 22 - Oct : Réunion de cadrage: oral presentation of the Detailed proposition
• November : Preliminary Design Review
• 24 – 26 Nov : European CubeSat Symposium (voluntary participation)

2022

• 21 - Jan : Rapport intermédiaire: a report sent to the Professors of École polytechnique

• Feb : Deadline Abstract Submission International Astronautical Congress 2022
_____________(voluntary participation)
• 25 - Apr : Rapport final: a report sent to the Professors of École polytechnique
• 25 - May : Evaluation PSC: oral presentation to the Professors of EP
• 1st Week Jun : Point Clé IonSat 2022 (Presentation to the partners of the project)
• Jul : Delivery Documentation to next team (compulsory)

For this year’s participation in the PSC, there are two main objectives:

• The first one is to successfully pass the Preliminary Design Review (PDR a.k.a. RDP, Revue de
Définition Préliminaire) to consolidate the advances in the project during the last years. The
progress of the project is considered advanced enough, the main task of the current team is to
compile all the information done by the previous team, complete some pending analyses, finalize
the documentation and present it clearly during the review.
• The second objective is to start working on the engineering model, the objective is to validate and
test many design decision choices. During this phase, the organization of the teams will be also
slightly modified, since at least two interns, will join the project at the beginning of the next year
and have full time dedication on topics like Structure Design and Integration and Testing.

Officially, each student has approximately 115 academic hours dedicated to the PSC, the distribution of
the hours and the proposed activities calendar can be seen in the Annex.
 Annex: Calendar

Table 1 - Student hours assigned to the PSC during the year

Table 2 – Activities planned during the year 2021