Small Satellite Technologies

Texas Spacecraft Laboratory

CSR is the research home of the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL). Founded in 2002 as the Satellite Design Laboratory, the TSL is a pedagogically motivated entity that engages students in systems engineering and small satellite design. As members of the TSL, undergraduate and graduate students design, manufacture, and operate small satellites and small satellite payloads in collaboration with university and government partners. This work is in support of technology demonstration missions relevant to the larger space industry, with current and past work related to relative navigation, deployable machine learning-based models for relative pose estimation, terrain-relative navigation at the Earth and Moon, and technology development to meet the needs of future TSL missions. TSL projects have been funded by NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory. TSL students come from all over campus, including the Cockrell School of Engineering, the College of Natural Sciences, the Jackson School of Geosciences, and the McCombs School of Business.

More information on the TSL may be found at: https://sites.utexas.edu/tsl/