I've been in mission control for a satellite when this is going on. It is the worst stress I have experienced in my professional career. Things sorted out in the end (some bias calibrations were just plain wrong). I hope for the best for this team!

My team is about to go through this ;) It's our first pair of satellite with solar panels in only one axis, so attitude control is critical. The satellites will be deployed on Wednesday, wish us luck!

Is there an equivalent to 'break a leg' in aerospace?

Good luck anyway!

May I ask what the primary constraint is for not adding a small panel that could at least enable bootstrap functionality?

The risk mitigation isn't worth the mass? Too complicated to implement?

Actually, before we extend the panels we do have do have solar cells on 3 out of 6 faces of the satellite - which should allow us to make sure our attitude control is working as expected.

We need to deploy the panels to maximize the solar collection area and thus power for the payloads. And there simply isn't enough space on the other panels to put "backup solar cells" :)

Some pictures and more info about the mission here: https://www.tu.berlin/en/about/profile/press-releases-news/n...

Neat! Thanks for the info!

"Fly safe." o7

I really do wish you luck!

Solar panels have nontrivial mass and this mission isn’t particularly long. Could something like a fuel cell been a better choice to power the electronics? How much energy do they need?