Quality Assurance Practices for Student Satellite Teams

Abstract

Pratham, IIT Bombay’s first student satellite was launched on September 26, 2016 onboard PSLV C-35. The intended mission life was of 4 months. The satellite was operational but the mission was not successful as only beacon signal was received and not the downlink signal. During the post-launch analysis, the team realized the importance of maintaining the quality. The IIT Bombay Student Satellite Team then started working on instituting quality assurance and management practices within the team. In the process, we listed and made few guidelines that can be useful for initiating and managing quality assurance in Student Satellite Projects across the world. This paper talks about our initial analysis and then lists down various activities to be performed to assure quality.