The LLITED Mission’s Post-Launch Status & Lessons Learned

The Low-Latitude Ionosphere/Thermosphere Enhancements in Density (LLITED) mission is a two 1.5U CubeSat mission to study nighttime ionosphere/thermosphere coupling. It successfully reached orbit in April 2023 and has completed early orbit commissioning. The two primary science payloads are successfully collecting science data as the mission transitions to nominal operations. The overall mission, from proposal development to on-orbit operations and science investigations, has presented a number of challenges often requiring difficult decisions and compromise. As a scientist, the goal is to progress on our understanding of the fundamental nature of the space environment, but as CubeSat mission Principal Investigator the goal has to be to reach orbit and obtain the maximum amount of science-grade observations possible given technical and programmatic resources and limitations. These two goals are not always aligned and require a flexible and practical approach to the mission to achieve the best outcome possible. This paper describes the major lessons learned specifically from the LLITED project as well as some more general CubeSat lessons from both the programmatic and technical perspective. These lessons include proposal budget considerations, mission scoping, risk assessment and mitigation, integration and testing, and general process activities. These lessons resulted from situations that were both within the project’s control (i.e., quality assurance) and without such as launch integration. The goal of this paper is for the lessons reported here to be of use to both current CubeSat missions, future concepts, and proposals in order to maximize investment returns for cutting-edge science from CubeSat platforms.