The Innovative Technology Partnerships Office (ITPO) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (Goddard) in Greenbelt, MD, invites you to celebrate Pi Day on March 14 and discover Pi-Sat. Current technology trends indicate a shift in satellite architectures from large, single satellite missions, to small, distributed spacecraft missions. At the center of this shift is the smallSat/cubesat architecture.

The primary goal of the Pi-Sat project is to create a low-cost, easy-to-use Distributed Spacecraft Mission (DSM) test bed to facilitate the research and development of next-generation DSM technologies and concepts. This test bed also serves as a realistic software development platform for small satellite and cubesat architectures.

The Pi-Sat is based on the popular Raspberry Pi single board computer. Raspberry Pi runs the Linux operating system and can easily run the Goddard developed Core Flight System (CFS) software* architecture. The Pi-Sat models currently include a Pi-Sat 1U Cube, a Pi-Sat Wireless Node, and a Pi-Sat cubesat processor card.

The Pi-Sat project takes advantage of many popular trends including 3D printing, rapid prototyping in order to provide a realistic platform for flight software testing, training, and technology development.

If you would like to learn more or want to pursue transfer possibilities for the Pi-Sat technology, please contact Enidia Santiago-Arce at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; 301.826.8497 (reference GSC‐17561‐1).

*The CFS software architecture is available to the public under a NASA Open Source Agreement. To learn more and/or to obtain a copy of the CFS suite please visit https://cfs.gsfc.nasa.gov/.


Topics:
Software