Mechanical Design and Manufacturing of the Microsatellite UNISAT

The microsatellite UNISAT, designed and integrated by students and researchers at Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, Università di Roma "la Sapienza", has been successfully launched on September 26th 2000, using the Dnepr launch vehicle. University programs, where low-cost microsatellites are developed with educational purposes, are usually driven by criteria which privilege short elapsed time from mission concept to satellite launch. Moreover, in microsatellites projects, the launcher selection phase is often moved to the end of the design process, thus requiring good structure performances for different loading conditions, and high flexibility to allocate the separation system. In this paper the main steps followed to manufacture the microsatellite UNISAT in the academic environment are discussed and analysed in detail; satellite drawings are shown with particular emphasis to the spacecraft-to-launcher adapter. It is shown how the satellite design was driven by the choice of the Dnepr launcher, allowing significant savings in terms of qualification tests, and giving the way to an unusual procedure to design and manufacture a low-cost educational microsatellite.