Heron Mk II Microbiology Nanosatellite
### DESCRIPTION ( Introduce yourserlf and your project)
Hello! We are the Space Systems Division of the University of Toronto Aerospace Team, and we are building a nanosatellite containing an autonomous microbiology experiment on a novel microfluidics platform. We are a team of undergraduate students, mainly funded through industry partners, donations and student levies.
We compete in the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge, and we plan to launch our satellite into Low Earth Orbit in January 2020. Here is a photo of our team!
### TECHNICAL DETAILS (With project photos)
Our satellite is made up of three main subsystems:
the Electronics Bus: where the power generation, storage and regulation, command and data handling, communications and control happens
the Structrual Systems: the physical structure of the satellite, as well as the thermal control
the Payload: contains our experiment and sensor platform
The experiment we run in our payload is a microbiology experiment on Candida Albicans, which is a yeast commonly found in the human gut. The yeast becomes more virulent and drug resistant in microgravity, and this has implications on the health of space travellers on long-term missions. We store the yeast in acrylic microfluidics chips, similar to ones seen in the image below. The central blister packs store the growth media necessary to activate the yeast and begin the experiment.
We have a custom low-noise amplifier chain and LEDs on the top and bottom of these chips which detect the fluorescence and optical density of the yeast in the cells to determine how their virulence and drug resistance have changed.
On the Electronics Bus of the satellite, we have a system composed of a central microcontroller (ATMega32M1), flash memory, real time clock, a CAN bus, power converters, solar panels, batteries and a UHF transceiver. All of these are implemented on Printed Circuit Boards. A high-level outline of how our electronics bus works is below, as well as a few example PCBs we have used from a previous iteration.
### Words to PCBWay
As a student team, we rely on industry partners and sponsors to allow us to continue this exciting and educational experience. We have previously used PCBWay in manufacturing some of our PCBs (before we were aware of the sponsorship options), and we were extremely happy with the results.
We would greatly appreciate any help you can give us, and we can recognize your contributions online, on social media and in the UTAT annual report (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ti_jWay5AexgiK7UGSd-2t9fSNZxkF3w).
Thank you so much!
Ali