PROVES-Yearling / Pleiades-Squared

PROVES-Yearling [Cal Poly]

PROVES-Yearling (Pleiades Rapid Orbital Verification Experimental System) is a 1U CubeSat technology demonstration mission by Cal Poly Pomona’s Bronco Space based on the PyCubed architecture and is designed to function as a space lab bench.

Modularity and low-cost hardware is priorized in order to create a CubeSat kit that can be made available to other university CubeSat programs to help them get a head start on development. The PROVES kit will include an unassembled structure, the novel Lovelace flight computer architecture, and a software instruction manual. Universities will also have access to the open source files for the entire kit. The kit's goal is to bridge the knowledge gap between what undergraduates are taught and what it takes to engineer a spacecraft.

The satellite carries along with it a Sony Spresense camera as well as 3 IMU's.

It was launched in January 2023 on Falcon-9 v1.2 (Block 5) on the Orbiter SN1 space tug. Orbiter SN1 suffered a power failure in orbit, which prevented the satellite from being deployed.

A reflight was launched in April 2023 under the designation PROVES-Yearling 2.

An improved version called Pleiades-Squared was launched in June 2023.