Sebastian Rückerl

• Doctor of Engineering
• Research Assistant at Technical University of Munich

At the Laboratory for Rapid Space Missions, we develop CubeSat missions and ISS-based experiments with diverging requirements. Due to limited manpower and resources, we cannot develop new and specifically tailored software and hardware for each of these projects. Instead, we propose the use of a distributed approach with well-defined and statically...

The RadMap Telescope is a new radiation-monitoring instrument operating in the U.S. Orbital Segment (USOS) of the International Space Station (ISS). The instrument was commissioned in May 2023 and will rotate through four locations inside American, European, and Japanese modules over a period of about six months. In some locations, it will take dat...

We describe the development of a command and data-handling system and a payload data processor for two science missions aboard 3U CubeSats. Both are built around radiation-hardened VA41620 microcontrollers and mostly rely on radiation-tolerant magnetoresistive random-access memory for data storage; the payload data processor is equipped with an XQR...

ComPol is a proposed CubeSat mission dedicated to long-term study of gamma-ray polarisation of astrophysical objects. Besides spectral and timing measurements, polarisation analysis can be a powerful tool in constraining current models of the geometry, magnetic field structure and acceleration mechanisms of different astrophysical sources. The ComP...

The recent and significant enlargement of aerospace research at the Technical University of Munich presents a unique opportunity to forge synergistic and enduring ties within the aerospace community in Munich and beyond. By establishing a multi-institutional Space Missions Laboratory dedicated to a broad field of disciplines—ranging from astrophysi...

At the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, we currently develop two scientific CubeSat missions: one to measure the flux of antiprotons in the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts and one to measure the polarization of X-rays originating from the Cygnus X-1 black hole. These missions have widely diverging requirements: While the first needs to operate reliabl...

Nanosatellites are often controlled by a monolithic command and data handling system. The Distributed Operating System Initiative for Satellites (DOSIS) framework enables controlling a satellite in a distributed and modular fashion. In this paper we present our approach to inter-process communication of software components in a network of micro con...

MOVE-II (Munich Orbital Verification Experiment) is the second satellite of the Technical University of Munich's educational CubeSat program. On December 3, 2018, the satellite was launched on the SSO-A SmallSat Express from the Vandenberg Air Force Base. The following paper shows on-orbit results of the first eight months of operations. It include...

The use of Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) microcontrollers enables rapid development of Cubesat platforms. However, extremely tight power and thermal budgets limit the available performance. This project showcases two different software architectures used on an STM32 microcontroller for sensor data processing: multithreaded and event loop. We pres...

In this paper, we will report on the results and lessons learned of the development, test and operation of two software-defined transceivers on the CubeSat mission MOVE-II (Munich Orbital Verification Experiment II). MOVE-II, a single-unit CubeSat, is the second satellite of the CubeSat program MOVE of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The...

MOVE-II (Munich Orbital Verification Experiment II) is a 1 Unit CubeSat currently under development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). This paper reports on the technical as well as the organizational advancements of the project. With overall more than 130 students involved so far, the project is currently in Phase D, with the launch of t...

We present Nanolink, a data link layer protocol for CubeSats and other spaceborne assets with similar bandwidth and hardware resources. The protocol is designed to operate with high efficiency and high reliability over links with a small bandwidth-delay product and moderate to weak signal quality. A type-I hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) sche...