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REGULUS is an Iodine-based electric propulsion system. It has been designed and manufactured at the Italian company Technology for Propulsion and Innovation SpA (T4i). REGULUS integrates the Magnetically Enhanced Plasma Thruster (MEPT) and its subsystems, namely electronics, fluidic, and thermo-structural in a volume of 1.5 U. The mass envelope is 2.5 kg, including propellant. REGULUS targets CubeSat platforms larger than 6 U and CubeSat carriers. A thrust T = 0.60 mN and a specific impulse Isp = 600 s are achieved with an input power of P = 50 W; the nominal total impulse is Itot = 3000 Ns. REGULUS has been integrated on-board of the UniSat-7 satellite and its In-orbit Demonstration (IoD) is currently ongoing. The principal topics addressed in this work are: (i) design of REGULUS, (ii) comparison of the propulsive performance obtained operating the MEPT with different propellants, namely Xenon and Iodine, (iii) qualification and acceptance tests, (iv) plume analysis, (v) the IoD.

The Nimbus Project team, made of young engineers and university students, is developing an Autonomous Re-Entry System (ARES) based on a controlled paraglider. The target is to use the ARES to autonomously recover a reusable sounding rocket in a specific area dedicated for landing. The system is mainly divided in two parts: the paraglider wing with a traditional configuration of a ram-air parachute and the control box which houses the main control electronics. Furthermore, the sounding rocket is attached to the control box and a ground station receives telemetry or sends telecommands for both the rocket and the control box. In order to test the system in-flight independently from the launch of a rocket, a fully functional Technology Demonstrator has been developed. It is built from Commercial-Off-The-Shelf items and components and from custom composite parts. The mass of the wing is about 200g for a surface of 1.1m2 and the control box mass is 550g. The electronics communicates through telemetry and telecommands with a ground PC. Attitude and position sensors are used in the control loop and three modes of operation can be selected. The ARES has been already flight tested in direct control mode.

Sounding rockets are a widely used test bench in the aerospace field that allow the testing of a huge quantity of products, parts ed experiments. However they are often expensive and require a long development cycle before launch. In this scenario, the Nimbus project team has developed a sounding rocket with the main purpose of engineering a reusable, cost-effective test bench, which is scalable to carry heavier payloads. It has already flown multiple times and, since the first version of the rocket, many upgrades have been introduced in order to improve its performances. To demonstrate its reusability in a short time, the rocket has been launched twice in two consecutive days.