The Versatile CubeSat Telescope: Going to Large Apertures in Small Spacecraft
Jaren N. Ashcraft, Ewan S. Douglas, Daewook Kim, George A. Smith,, Kerri Cahoy, Tom Connors, Kevin Z. Derby, Victor Gasho, Kerry Gonzales,, Charlotte E. Guthery, Geon Hee Kim, Corwyn Sauve, Paul Serra

TL;DR
This paper introduces a versatile, cost-effective CubeSat telescope platform with a 95 mm aperture, optimized for performance and stability, suitable for various space applications including astronomy and Earth imaging.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel all-aluminum CubeSat telescope design with a new performance characterization tool and detailed analysis of thermal, structural, and launch considerations.
Findings
Achieved diffraction-limited performance with a 95 mm aperture
Developed a performance degradation characterization tool
Demonstrated thermal stability and launch survivability
Abstract
The design of a CubeSat telescope for academic research purposes must balance complicated optical and structural designs with cost to maximize performance in extreme environments. Increasing the CubeSat size (eg. 6U to 12U) will increase the potential optical performance, but the cost will increase in kind. Recent developments in diamond-turning have increased the accessibility of aspheric aluminum mirrors, enabling a cost-effective regime of well-corrected nanosatellite telescopes. We present an all-aluminum versatile CubeSat telescope (VCT) platform that optimizes performance, cost, and schedule at a relatively large 95 mm aperture and 0.4 degree diffraction limited full field of view stablized by MEMS fine-steering modules. This study features a new design tool that permits easy characterization of performance degradation as a function of spacecraft thermal and structural…
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