Acta Astronautica 56 (2005) 696–704 www.elsevier.com/locate/actaastro ThemicrosatelliteresearchprogramatUniversitàdiBologna  P.Tortora ∗ ,E.Troiani II Facoltà di Ingegneria, Università di Bologna, Via Fontanelle 40-47100 Forlì, Italy Received 14 June 2004; accepted 9 November 2004 Abstract IntheIIFacultyofEngineeringoftheUniversityofBologna,theAerospaceGroupinForlìhasstartedanewmicrosatellite research program. The first step consists of the design and setup of an amateur radio ground station, recently installed and implemented in the University laboratories.At the same time, researchers, Ph.D. and graduate students are directly involved in the satellite design. The microsatellite weighs about 20kg and consists of a cubical prism, 300mm side, with a modular structure made of six shop-machined Al trays, kept together by eight stainless steel bars. Four Al/Al honeycomb sandwich lateralpanels,whicharethesupportstructureofgluedsolarpanels,completethesatellitestructure.Thisarchitecturehasbeen selected in order to have a multi-purpose bus, to be used with minor changes for several missions, accommodating payloads with different volume and power requirements. This paper reports on the current status of the ground station implementation and microsatellite bus design and manufacturing. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In the last decades, a large number of research institutions and universities started their own programs for the design and manufacturing of mini/micro/nanosatellites [1]. On one hand this trend has been allowed by the lowered launch costs, due to the emerging market of small launchers; on the otherhand,ithasbeendrivenbyindustrialcompanies  Paper IAC-03-M.4.06 presented at the 54th International As- tronautical Congress, 29 September–3 October 2003, Bremen, Germany. ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: paolo.tortora@unibo.it (P. Tortora), enrico.troiani@unibo.it (E. Troiani). 0094-5765/$-see front matter © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2004.11.002 and national space agencies, which, along with im- portantspaceresearchprojectswithglobalresonance, encouraged the design of small missions, typically to be developed in a short time, to achieve a few sim- ple goals. This design philosophy guarantees the pos- sibility to perform low cost in orbit tests of innova- tive technologies and methodologies and, at the same time, it offers frequent and cheap opportunities to the scientific community to fly small space experiments. Furthermore, theAmerican and European universi- tieswhopioneeredthedevelopmentofsmallsatellites, for example the Stanford University [2] and the Uni- versity of Surrey [3] had established a mutually ben- eficial co-operation with the industry and the national space agencies.