Francisco Segura Hernández

RetiSAT - PreMission Idea Contest 5th Edition Contestant

The first aerospace project that I worked on. Consisted of a proposal for the 5th Pre Mission Idea Contest, organized by UNISEC. It was called RetiSAT, it's mission consisted off tracking and analizing red tides in central america. This was done by it's scientific payload, which I helped select and specify. This payload contained a Short Wave Infrared Camera (SWIR) camera for color variation on the surface, a traditional camera in the visible spectrum for visual tracking and a Long Wave Infrared Camera (LWIR) for temperature mapping on the surface. This project was overengineered in several areas, including the electrical power subsystem, the other area that I also helped design. A couple points of criticism for this project were it's high power budget of almost 250W and the fact that it was a 12 unit cubesat proposal, which at the time it was not supported by the cubesat standard. Nowadays, as of revision 14, 12 units cubesats are considerated on the standard as a viable structure for high complexity missions. The final result for this project was that it won regionally on the Pre Mission Idea Contest held in Mexico, after that if was presented on Rome, at the event, were it was heavily critized but still an excellent learning opportunity for all of us, both in soft and technical skills.