COEP Satellite Team at 63rd International Astronautical Congress

Shreyas Kulkarni (TY, Entc) and Rohit Joshi (Btech ,Electrical) along with Gautam Akiwate (Coep alumni) visited Naples, Italy as a part of The 63rd International Astronautical Congress (IAC) conducted from 1st-5th Oct. IAC is the annual premier space conference organized by the International Astronautical Federation, International Academy of Astronautics and International Institute of Space Law with close participation of all the countries’ space agencies, NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, CNSA, ROSCOSMOS, ISRO, CIRA to name a few and also some private sector agencies.

The Power subsystem of the CSAT team had a paper accepted for oral presentation in the 42nd Student Conference in this year’s IAC. The paper was titled “A Modular, Efficient, Low cost Power System for Pico-satellite Applications”. It summarized the design and testing of the Electronic Power system on board the COEP Satellite. The 18min presentation was telecast live on the IAF virtual forum (http://www.iafastro.org/index.html?title=VF).The team also had another paper presented under the UN/IAA symposium. This was titled “Open Source Student satellites”, co-authored by the On board Computer subsystem of CSAT.

The conference is like the Mecca for Aerospace Engineering and Space technology. The team got an opportunity to interact with a lot of experts in this field. “We were told about factors we never even considered, while some people guided us on the difficulties we were facing. More importantly, people across the globe took notice of and appreciated the work done in our college so far. People took interest in the design and test philosophies adopted by us” said Shreyas.

Together now the CSAT team has 4 papers published at the IAC, 2 papers last year and 2 this year. This is the most number of papers by an Indian college, pertaining to the technical work done in an ongoing project.