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Space technology, satellite systems, and aerospace engineering
6 Problem Statements in this Domain (5 Standard + 1 Open Innovation)
Nano/pico-satellite (CubeSat-class) missions built by Indian academic teams operate under extremely tight power, mass, and cost budgets, ruling out the full-featured attitude sensor suites (star trackers, precision gyroscopes) used on larger, well-funded missions, yet accurate attitude determination remains essential for mission success (pointing solar panels, antennas, payload sensors correctly) — requiring genuinely creative sensor fusion from minimal, low-cost, lower-accuracy sensors (basic magnetometer, sun sensor, low-cost gyro) to achieve mission-adequate pointing accuracy.
As India's small satellite constellation activity grows alongside a rapidly increasing global population of debris and other satellites, collision risk assessment for maneuver planning depends heavily on orbital tracking data that carries significant, often poorly-quantified uncertainty (tracking accuracy varies substantially by object size, tracking source, and update frequency), and naive collision-probability calculations that do not properly account for this uncertainty can produce dangerously overconfident or uselessly over-cautious risk assessments — either of which has real operational cost.
Small satellites experience subsystem anomalies (power, thermal, communication) that, without timely diagnosis, can escalate into full mission loss, but ground-based diagnosis is limited by infrequent ground-station contact windows and severely constrained telemetry bandwidth, meaning a satellite may need to identify, prioritize, and potentially begin responding to its own faults with minimal onboard compute — a genuinely constrained embedded fault-diagnosis problem quite different from typical fault-diagnosis research assuming ample compute and continuous data availability.
Ionospheric scintillation — irregular electron density disturbances, particularly severe over the Indian low-latitude/equatorial region especially post-sunset — can significantly degrade GPS positioning accuracy and satellite communication reliability, but comprehensive real-time scintillation monitoring across India's geographic extent requires many more monitoring stations than the currently sparse network of expensive scientific-grade receivers can provide, limiting the spatial and temporal resolution of scintillation risk information available to affected users (aviation, defence navigation, telecom).
High-altitude balloon platforms offer an affordable way to collect stratospheric atmospheric data, but scientifically useful measurement (and imaging) often requires reasonably stable payload attitude/pointing despite the balloon's uncontrolled, wind-driven trajectory and rotation, and payload recovery after landing in remote or difficult terrain is uncertain enough that the system must also be designed to maximize the value of data actually transmitted during flight, not only data recovered afterward with the physical payload.
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