ONERA, a key player in applied research on orbital systems in Europe, has also a Nanosat development roadmap since 2019. This program has several major goals, including developing scientific payloads ready to be integrated in partner’s platform and collaborative mission with research, academic and industrial entities. Ultimately, ONERA will cover most of the technical and administrative aspects of a Cubesat mission, such as payload design, AIT, operations, telecommunications and licensing. 

Strategy and expectations

One of the core expertise of ONERA is the development of high-tech instruments dedicated to land, air and space systems. With this solid background, ONERA has started the design of several payloads (described in section 0) for earth science and observation, radar study, spacecraft charging and radiation belts monitoring. The goal is also to validate the components and systems by reaching a TRL 9.

Each ONERA technical department is specialized in a specific field, such as optical, electromagnetism, materials, or space environment effects. Thus, the several teams working on Cubesat payloads have a solid background in each of their fields, completed by a transverse Cubesat approach to support them (see §2.1). The operations of the payload and the data processing once received is the responsibility of the team which designed it to guarantee the best understanding of systematic and unexpected behaviors.

Our organization does not include for the near future the development of the Cubesat platform or its integration and tests. Instead, we prefer to rely on experienced partners working with proven subsystems with whom we can collaborate to design and launch the best platform for our payloads. However, we are seeking to operate or collaborate in the operations of our missions to fully control the commissioning and the tests of our payloads in order to understand them as well as possible.
The partnerships involved in our missions are linked with the platform as stated above as well as the development of some of the payloads. In all cases, our goal as a state funded institution is to support industry and particularly emerging startups by, for instance, collaborating in the answer to a request for proposal. ONERA experts can also team up with our partners and develop together a system ready to be ready to fly. 
Finally, our strong links with many universities and their space centers as well as research labs provide us great opportunities to exchange information and share technical capacities, some of them unique in France at ONERA. This connection also allows us to train students and host some during internships.