Requirements Analysis

[enduringsecond]

Phase 1: Requirements Analysis
The team have been through the N-Prize rules to create a formal and categorised set of the main requirements that must be met for the SSO prize. For this project they have managed to get the rules on a page as a UML requirements diagram. We would perhaps term this main set of requirements "Key User Requirements". There are others, but this is the critical set which will drive our concepts, analysis and design.

Requirements Analysis View

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The requirements have been categorised as follows: Performance Requirements, Structural Requirements, Functional Requirements and Financial Requirements.

Points to note:
(1) There aren't many requirements compared to our usual projects....
(2) Functional requirements are minimal - probably leading to a transponder + power source.
(3) Launch equipment rules and costs maybe key to any chance of achieving this successfully = keep the costs on the ground.

This one pager requirements analysis will help focus our minds as we think about solution concepts. Each concept will potentially have derived requirements based on the analysis which may be concept specific.

Regards,
Chris

[SANEAlex]

Thanks for sharing. A question was the SSO version assigned to the team as the only choice for the task or did you also discuss the idea of a reusable version where there may be an option to spend a bit more on parts as long as you could recondition, refuel and put up another satellite for under £1000.

[enduringsecond]

The focus on the SSO version was the result of an early team discussion, where it was felt that returning any elements of the Launch Vehicle to earth for re-use was a step too far given the other requirements of the challenge.

We therefore decided on the SSO version, although we do intend that large elements of the ground-based Launch Equipment are re-usable.

It is our feeling that developing re-usable Launch Equipment that can launch relatively cheap satellites on a regular basis is probably the only way this project can realistically be achieved from a financial perspective. This solution can then support cheap individual launches for university research projects (or even private individuals) and the launch of constellations of femto-satellites based around a distributed architecture (which is a concept we are also working on, although not of course for the N-Prize).

Regards,
Chris

[SANEAlex]

If you are interested in clouds of femto-satellites have you come across http://pocketspacecraft.com/ they had a cube sat as a secondary payload on one of SpaceX's launches back in April and they seem well on there way to printing circuitry onto to what you might call femto-satellites they appeared on BBC click about the same time as the launch.