Intelligent optimisation of microsatellite on-board power systems

The Surrey Space Centre has pioneered the research and development of modern microsatellites technologies over the last twenty years. Obviously, the small volume of these satellites places severe constraints on power available for applications payloads on board the satellite, therefore many research projects at Surrey have been carried out to reduce power consumption of both satellite platform and payloads. This paper describes one of these projects which is the use of an automatic power scheduling algorithm for the PICOSAT mission, a microsatellite developed by SSTL under contract to the USAF SSP (Small Satellite Programme). The purpose of this algorithm is to predict the battery and memory levels on a short term basis and automatically schedule the on-board experiments activities in order to optimise the power and memory usage over the selected period, meeting the constraints and requirements for the mission. The algorithm makes use of a recursive feedback loop to reach the optimum output. An initial prototype of the algorithm has been implemented using MATLAB and, once fully tested, it is intended to port and run it on the satellite On Board Computer in orbit. The experiment priorities and payload characteristics are specified in separate modules, allowing the easy reuse and upgrade of the algorithm for different payload configurations under other SSTL satellites.