Figure 2: First laser cut iteration of wooden CubeSat housing

KAOS - 1

KAOS-1 (Knight Air Observer Satellite 1) is a 4U (20x20x10cm) CubeSat utilizing a wooden housing, marking the first of its kind at UCF. The satellite will use roughly 6 sensors to gather atmospheric data along with 2 cameras to document the process. KAOS will perform it's mission utilizing a weather balloon which will take the CubeSat to about 100,000 feet in addition to a 6ft parachute for recovery. This project involves numerous interdisciplinary skills and hands-on learning experience with Material Science, Electrical engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical/Aerospace engineering, Computer engineering, and radio/communications.

The roles, responsibilities, and experience for each sub-team for KAOS-1 is detailed below. Anyone is welcome and we are always looking for new members who are excited to work on the project.

Mechanical Team: CAD modeling, housing assembly, analysis modeling, material research, manufacturing, and recovery systems

Electrical: PCB design and manufacturing, testing internal systems, power systems, microcontroller development, and soldering

Software: Recovery system, data acquisition & storage, and GPS tracking

Communications: RF & NOAA licenses, ground systems, and communication hardware

Sub-Teams

Getting Involved

The best time to join the rest of team working on KAOS-1 is now and absolutely zero experience is required. Getting started is really easy and simply requires your participation by coming to one of our weekly team meetings which are posted within the "General KAOS" or "announcements" channel in our Discord. Project updates can be found on our social media accounts along with additional information about the project.

KAOS - 0

Figure 1: KAOS-0 after a catastrophic failure occurred during the launch of the payload

Initially utilizing a 3D printed housing KAOS-0 was launched August 13, 2022. Unfortunately a catastrophic failure occurred with another RSO's rocket that KAOS-0 was within. As seen below the results were also catastrophic for our CubeSat without any of the data being recoverable. However this version was still valuable to our team and a lot of expertise was gained throughout every stage of version 0.

Figure 3: Electrical team testing PCB's in flat configuration to easily debug