OreSat (Portland State Aerospace Society)

OreSat is an open-source, 'artisanally hand-crafted' CubeSat platform developed by the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), an interdisciplinary student aerospace project within Portland State University's Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. PSAS traces its roots to amateur rocketry work in the late 1990s and has since grown into a group of roughly a hundred students of all majors, along with graduate students, faculty advisors, and industry mentors, operating under 501(c)(3) nonprofit status through the PSU Foundation.

The OreSat program's design is an open-source, modular, card-cage CubeSat bus scalable from 1U to 3U, intended as an inexpensive, educational platform that other student and university teams can build on. Its first spacecraft, OreSat0, was a 1U CubeSat billed as Oregon's first satellite; it launched on an Astra Rocket 3.3 (mission LV009) on March 15, 2022 into a 525 km sun-synchronous orbit, flying solar panels, batteries, radios, an onboard computer, GPS, and a star tracker to provide flight heritage for OreSat's subsystems.

PSAS followed with OreSat0.5, a 2U CubeSat that launched aboard SpaceX's Transporter-11 rideshare mission on August 16, 2024 into a 510 km sun-synchronous orbit, deployed via ExoLaunch's NOVA CubeSat Deployer. OreSat0.5 demonstrated the attitude determination and control system (ADCS) of the OreSat bus and carried the Cirrus Flux Camera (CFC), a short-wave infrared sensor for Earth observation. The flagship OreSat mission, a 2U CubeSat accepted into NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) and planned for deployment from the International Space Station via NanoRacks, is designed to carry two independent payload missions: OreSat Live and CFC.