Developing the Engineering Foundation for the BRITEs at Dynacon

Prior to Space Flight Laboratory developing the design for the BRITE nanosats, initial systems engineering design for those satellites was carried out at Dynacon. This focused on defining a Nanosatellite High Performance Attitude Control (NanoHPAC) Subsystem for the Generic Nanosatellite Bus (GNB) design that was being developed at SFL in the early 2000s, essential elements of this were a nanosat-sized reaction wheel and star tracker. We defined the main parameters of both of those, and developed the first version of a NanoWheel (although the BRITEs ended up flying with the second version). All of this built on the foundation laid by the earlier MOST microsatellite mission, which was similarly enabled by the development of the earlier microsat-scale HPAC subsystem. I will describe those early engineering activities at Dynacon, that laid the foundation for the BRITEs.