DISCO-2 is designed by students from Aarhus University and the IT University of Copenhagen and was initially a 2U cubesat of 10x10x20 cm. During vendor-negotiations the satellite size increased to 3U (10x10x30cm).
The satellite itself contains:
- Expandable UHF antennas for communication with the ground station for satellite control
- S-band patch antenna and potentially x-band patch antenna for high bandwidth downlink
- Multi-band radio for communication via antennas to and from the ground station
- Power system consisting of battery and solar cells mounted on the satellite itself and on expandable solar panels
- Redundant computer system for command execution and control and monitoring of systems on board.
- Attitude control system consisting of reaction wheels, magnetorquers and temperature, magnetic field, rotation and solar sensors.
- Payload consisting of two cameras:
- Optical camera with wide-field lens for exact location verification, large scale mapping etc.
- Optical camera with zoom lens for high-resolution images of the earth's surface for the study of, glaciers, snow cover, icebergs and much more.
Exploded view of a cubsat similar in components to DISCO-2. Credit: Space Inventor
- Aluminium structure
- Electric power supply with batteries, separations switches, bus regulation, load protection, housekeeping
- 4 body-mounted solar panels + 2 double deployable solar panels
- Attitude control system with 4 reaction wheels, 4 magnetorquers, 5 sun sensors, gyro, magnetometer, computer. Pointing modes: Nadir (sun-optimised), ground spot tracking (sun-optimised tracking), inertial, sun tracking
- Multi-band transceiver with UHF/VHF low power link + S-band high speed link
- Industrial color camera with custom optics and qualification
- Monopole antennas for low speed link, patch antenna for high speed link
