Why we're going to orbit
Validate Additive Manufacturing
Demonstrate that 3D-printed carbon-fiber-filled PPS survives launch loads, thermal cycling from -40°C to +80°C, and orbital radiation, at only a fraction of the cost of machined aluminum or titanium.
Proof-of-Mission Imagery from Orbit
Capture and downlink a clear photo of the school's Pixel mascot figure against Earth. Requires a complete pipeline: 3-axis ADCS pointing, 720p camera payload, JPEG/AVIF compression, chunked streaming, and successful RF downlink.
Close the Space-to-Ground Link
Establish reliable UHF LoRa communications for heartbeats, telemetry, commands, and image chunks, using tinygs and partner ground stations.
Prove the High-School Model
Show that a team of high schoolers with no adult engineering oversight and a $10,000 hardware budget can conceive, build, launch, and operate a functional orbital spacecraft.
Engineering from first principles
Every subsystem is designed in-house, from the hand-wound copper magnetorquers
to the no_std Rust flight software.
Here's what makes PixelSat I tick.
ADCS
Attitude Determination & Control
Three-axis attitude control via custom air-core magnetorquers wound by hand from enamel copper wire on polycarbonate bobbins (PLA/PETG ruled out — softens in use). Torque follows τ = m × B where m = N·I·A. H-bridge MOSFETs flip 11.1 V across each coil; closed-loop PWM with current sensing compensates for resistance drift as wire heats in vacuum. An Extended Kalman Filter on ESP32 CPU1 fuses IMU, magnetometer, and coarse sun sensors continuously.
Flight Software
ESP32-first flight software
An ESP32 handles all mission-critical work in no_std Rust, ADCS on CPU1, comms scheduling on CPU0, with a hardware watchdog chip monitoring liveness. The current simplification path is to keep imagery on the ESP32 using a camera module that can emit JPEG frames directly, then store and chunk those images for RF downlink. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W remains under evaluation only as a secondary camera computer, watchdogged by the ESP32 ULP if it is used.
Communications
UHF LoRa · w/ TinyGS-ready downlink
To maintain reliability and remain under budget we intent to use LoRa/SX radios and toward a flight-proven UHF LoRa transceiver for heartbeats, telemetry, commands, and image chunks. TinyGS provides the downlink path, with partner ground-station support under evaluation. A compact omnidirectional antenna design is being evaluated for structure-level integration near the transceiver.
Power & Electrical
4P3S Li-ion + solar array
Master power from a 4P3S pack of twelve 21700-format Li-ion cells stepped down to a 5 V satellite bus. Twelve 10x10 cm solar panels (three per long face) both charge the pack and serve as coarse sun sensors via shunt-resistor current measurement. A custom relay-based power controller enforces priority-ranked load shedding under low-battery conditions. Kapton tape and aluminized thermal blanketing insulate the battery from orbital temperature extremes.
Eighteen engineers, all Students.
A fully student-operated team spanning structural, electrical, software, ADCS, comms, and outreach, across five different time zones.
Help us put
PixelSat I
into orbit.
Our launch is already booked. Every dollar you contribute goes directly to hardware: sensors, PCBs, test equipment, and the components needed to build a satellite that actually works. We're doing this on a $10,000 materials budget, roughly the price of a used car for an orbital spacecraft.
Donate on GoFundMeprojectpixelorbital.com · Stanford Online High School · Est. Feb 2025