Camiel Plevier, GomSpace
Juventas CubeSat is inside HERA on its way to meet Dimorphos in 2027, for a challenging mission involving radar, landing and gravitational science.
Just as complex as the mothercraft, but only a fraction of the cost, developing a CubeSat for such a mission has its challenges. Functional validation on FlatSat played an important role in development and continues to be valuable for the automated operations. First in-flight checkouts are routine after dry-runs of procedures on FlatSat. Running extended checkouts still yielded some surprises that could be analysed using the FlatSat reference data.