CAPSat stands for Cooling, Annealing, and Pointing Satellite. CAPSat is one of three Undergraduate Student Instrumentation Program (USIP) satellites being developed at LASSI. CAPSat is a 3U CubeSat built in partnership with the Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Physics Departments. An active cooling system will demonstrate on-demand system temperature reduction. Strain actuated solar arrays will demonstrate fine control pointing and spacecraft jitter reduction. Finally, an annealing payload will evaluate various photosensor reset technologies to compensate for radiation damage.

I started on this project late into development. However, I found the Strain Actuated Solar Array (SASA) payload, was essentially given up on. So I became the lead avionics/electrical engineer for this payload and got to work. I redesigned the main control board for this payload and also made significant changes to its support board. This required redesigning the schematic for both of these boards, laying out this new design on a PCB, then actually getting them printed. From there, I hand assembled them. I worked closely with a fellow student who was writing the firmware for this payload. We debugged the payload for some time, but then we were unfortunately interrupted by COVID right around integration time.