For the past decade, satellite design has been an important discipline at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology. A major change of the predominantly theoretical nature of the satellite projects came into being in 2004, with the completion of an in-house Class 100.000 Clean Room. Along with equipment in laboratories located at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, this facility enables Delft University to not only design, but to produce and assemble a small student satellite in house as well.

Learning about this affordable access to space, the space company Dutch Space approached the faculty of Aerospace Engineering to discuss the possibility to test a new type of thin film solar cells in the space environment. In addition, the Dutch research institute TNO Science and Industry showed interest to join the initiative with an autonomous Sun Sensor using a wireless link for data transfer. A third new technology tested during the Delfi-C3 mission is an advanced high efficiency transceiver sized for application in pico- and nanosatellites. With these three new technologies as primary payloads and the space proven CubeSat concept as a basic principle of design, the Delfi-C3 nanosatellite is to be the first satellite that is designed and realized at Delft University of Technology. Delfi-C3 is scheduled for a piggyback launch by july 2007.

The transceiver is used to receive commands from the Delfi ground station and transmit measurement and housekeeping data back to the ground segment. There will be no on-board data storage, so all measured data will be transmitted directly to the ground segment. The satellite will make use of the amateur radio frequency bands, so the transceiver will be compatible with the AMSAT standards and operate as a linear transponder that can be used by radio amateurs. In return the radio amateurs are asked to collect the Delfi-C3 data and send it to the Delfi ground station in Delft. In this way, data can be collected from the satellite even when it is not within range of the Delfi ground station.

Besides the technical mission objectives mentioned before, the Delfi-C3 project has educational objectives as well. Delfi-C3 is a Master’s Thesis project, its main educational objective is to provide MSc students as a team the opportunity to gain hands-on interdisciplinary engineering experience with the design and realization of both mission and systems of a satellite by providing a challenging real-world application