2024-25 WUSAT-4 Team

2024-25 WUSAT-4 Team (Pictured)

Left-to-Right

• Aman Batra (Mech)

• Devansh Barman (Elec)

• Natasha Galpayage Dona (Elec)

• Josh Shilling (Mech)

• Alia Meek (Comp Sys)

• Dr Bill Crofts (Director)

• Nilavan Thipaharan (Elec)

• Avani Sawe (Mech)

2024-25 WUSAT-4 Overview

It was fortunate that we didn't learn that this would be the last WUSAT team until after the 2024-25 team had completed their work. During their year they made excellent progress in most areas of WUSAT-4 development (see their documentation below), they attended ESA training programmes and also an Airbus CubeSat Day where their work was very well received.

The teams attendance at the ESA Design Booster event was intended to boost the strength of our planned submission to the ESA FYS Flight Programme call in early 2026. Unfortunately, once it was known that there would be no replacement Director to hand-over to when Bill retired, we could not recruit a 2025-26 team and commit ESA and Space Park Leicester to considerable resources that we could not see through to a potential launch.

Nevertheless, this should not cloud the achievements of the 2024-25 team and the excellent work that they completed. They progressed WUSAT-4 close to completion of Phase C with the construction of an engineering/qualification model and validation via a Critical Design Review with Airbus engineers. This would have generated the requirement for ESA FYS flight programme submission in 2026. They completed extensive work on Structural & Mechanism's design, a thermal control strategy, electrical power system design, and detailed FDSPP payload interface design. All of this was completed under the control of rigorous Space Systems Engineering employing a Concurrent Engineering approach for most design considerations.

2024-25 WUSAT-4 Gallery