IAC-15-A3.5.9 Low power lightweight micro-meteorological station for wireless sensor network based space exploration

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consisting of a large number of low power and lightweight micro- meteorological platforms represent an innovative approach to reliable environmental monitoring (tolerant to nodes failures) for planetary surface exploration. This paper presents the hardware improvements designed and developed in the frame of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme SWIPE project' (Space Wireless sensor networks for Planetary Exploration), towards obtaining a fully autonomous platform, both in terms of operation and power harvesting, which is at the same time compact and lightweight (below 2Kg). Low mass, low power consumption and smart thermal regulation are three of the main objectives to be achieved when using solar energy as the main power source instead of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs). Solar energy instead RTGs will significantly reduce the cost of each node, thus cutting down the overall mission costs. In this paper the micro-meteorological configuration structure is presented and the custom-made optimized sub-systems arc described, including the complete scientific payload, Power Subsystem, On Board Computer (OBC), Software-Defined Radio (SDR) communications platform and auxiliary subsystems for thermal regulation and platform deployment. Even though the node design has been developed for a specific mission (Moon surface exploration), there is a lot of potential for any planetary exploration mission. The nodes were developed using a modular approach, enabling to swap subsystems easily, without losing or significantly redesigning their functionality. This paper will also shed some light on the most promising future applications, which could take advantage of the node flexibility and adaptability to different environments and deployment techniques.