“Beyond Gravity worked with Manuel to develop the reflectometry processing core being flown on PRETTY through a previous ESA project,” says Andreas Dielacher, system engineer at the company.

“Next we looked for a flight opportunity – initially we hoped for the International Space Station or else to fit aboard the OPS-SAT CubeSat overseen by TU Graz. Then the success of OPS-SAT led us to consider a dedicated CubeSat mission. In fact PRETTY ended up as Beyond Gravity’s very first CubeSat.”

Intensive computation

CubeSats are small, cheap satellites built up from standardised 10-cm boxes, hosting all necessary systems as well as mission payloads. In PRETTY’s case, its processing core works in combination with the patch antennas and a software derived radio, offering added flexibility during the post-launch commissioning phase.