The satellite team responsible for OreSat is a part of the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS). PSAS is an interdisciplinary student team based out of Portland State University, developing open-source rockets and nanosatellites for use by other university groups.
Our mission at OreSat is to create the resources we wished we had when we first ventured into building and flying CubeSats. The purpose of our work is to facilitate affordable, effective, and open-source systems that can be easily manufactured and assembled by amateurs like us who want to use them. By paving the way for a functional and reliable CubeSat, our hope is that the community will build upon these designs—to continue to improve and evolve and share that work so the community might benefit. This is the ethos behind open-source technology.
Historically, the work of PSAS is well documented. However, the usefulness of this written information can be limited by how it is organized. OreSat has flown two functioning satellites since 2022, which has allowed us to test our systems in low earth orbit. With the data we’ve collected and the lessons learned, we are putting in a concerted effort to consolidate this information in the form of manuals for each satellite subsystem. The goal is to make this information organized, easy to navigate, and consistently formatted by providing a template for each system manual.