The topic of Digital Twins has gained significant attention in recent years, with increased research and industry interest. Initially introduced in product lifecycle management, Digital Twins are best described as digital representations of physical components with bidirectional data connections to enable convergence between physical and digital states. This concept promises an improved understanding of products throughout their lifecycle. The space sector has seen a surge in satellite launches over the past 20 years, particularly with smaller satellites like CubeSats. Initially used for technology demonstrations by universities, CubeSats now increasingly carry scientific payloads, enabling low-cost, custom science missions. This shift has heightened the demand for risk management, reliability, and predictable data delivery. The increasing competition in the aerospace industry has intensified the need for more efficient methods. Digital Twins offer a data-driven approach to addressing these challenges over the entire lifecycle of CubeSats. This research presents an optimized methodology for Digital Twins tailored to CubeSats, analyzing design, performance, and implementation strategies. Key challenges and requirements are identified through an analysis of the current state of Digital Twins in literature and an industry evaluation. The evaluation includes a questionnaire and expert interviews, which are conducted to assess the current state of implementations within the industry through a maturity model. The expert interviews offer in-depth insights into current industry practices and the perceived potential of this technology. The collected data is analyzed to derive actionable insights, providing a broader perspective and helping to tailor the Digital Twin concept to the specific needs of CubeSat development. An architecture is presented with a detailed description of the different elements and their interactions to enhance understanding. The CubeSat Digital Twin is described throughout the lifecycle stages, presenting potential implementations and applications. Particular emphasis is placed on aligning the digital domain architecture with CubeSat characteristics to potentially improve implementation efficiency, proposing reusable modules for other missions. An overall framework is introduced, detailing the basic architecture, connections between different components, potential applications in the CubeSat sector, and the resulting benefits. To demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach, the methodology is implemented in a CubeSat project, the EventSat, by the Chair of Spacecraft Systems at the Technical University of Munich. This project involves a 6U CubeSat designed to advance object detection in space using an event-based camera. The implementation strategy focuses on the power management of the satellite and illustrates its practical application by developing a Digital Twin to mirror the satellite’s behavior with an automated control loop. This system correlates real-world data with simulations and adapts the operation of the physical payload to changing parameters. This implementation demonstrates the advantages of early lifecycle data correlation, enhancing the understanding of the satellite’s behavior and enabling early configuration optimization to increase the operational time of the scientific mission.
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The topic of Digital Twins has gained significant attention in recent years, with increased research and industry interest. Initially introduced in product lifecycle management, Digital Twins are best described as digital representations of physical components with bidirectional data connections to enable convergence between physical and digital states. This concept promises an improved understanding of products throughout their lifecycle. The space sector has seen a surge in satellite launches...
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