Interplanetary Student Nanospacecraft: Development of the LEO Demonstrator ESTCube-2

Nanosatellites have established their importance in low-Earth orbit (LEO), and it is common for student teams to build them for educational and technology demonstration purposes. The next challenge is the technology maturity for deep-space missions. The LEO serves as a relevant environment for maturing the spacecraft design. Here we present the ESTCube-2 mission, which will be launched onboard VEGA-C VV23. The satellite was developed as a technology demonstrator for the future deep-space mission by the Estonian Student Satellite Program. The ultimate vision of the program is to use the electric solar wind sail (E-sail) technology in an interplanetary environment to traverse the solar system using lightweight propulsion means. Additional experiments were added to demonstrate all necessary technologies to use the E-sail payload onboard ESTCube-3, the next nanospacecraft targeting the lunar orbit. The E-sail demonstration requires a high-angular velocity spin-up to deploy a tether, resulting in a need for a custom satellite bus. In addition, the satellite includes deep-space prototypes: deployable structures; compact avionics stack electronics (including side panels); star tracker; reaction wheels; and cold-gas propulsion. During the development, two additional payloads were added to the design of ESTCube-2, one for Earth observation of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and the other for corrosion testing in the space of thin-film materials. The ESTCube-2 satellite has been finished and tested in time for delivery to the launcher. Eventually, the project proved highly complex, making the team lower its ambitions and optimize the development of electronics, software, and mechanical structure. The ESTCube-2 team dealt with budgetary constraints, student management problems during a pandemic, and issues in the documentation approach. Beyond management techniques, the project required leadership that kept the team aware of the big picture and willing to finish a complex satellite platform. The paper discusses the ESTCube-2 design and its development, highlights the team's main technical, management, and leadership issues, and presents suggestions for nanosatellite and nanospacecraft developers.