Original Concept
The original concept involved stripping down the consumer casing on an existing spherical camera and fitting it with other commercial, off-the-shelf components to develop an ultra-low cost, disposable imaging system in a CubeSat for capturing images during deployment and transmitting them back to the deployer. Courtesy Iggy Matheson.
The cameras of the consumer spherical camera were in a tetrahedral arrangement. This was one concept for how to minimize the obstruction caused by fitting the camera arrangement into a CubeSat frame.
Camera System Prototype
I created a concept demonstration using a USB battery, a Raspberry Pi, 4 USB cameras, and a Python script that used OpenCV to initialize the cameras, take a stream of images, and save them to memory. My team color corrected the images and produced a slideshow showing that the camera modules could be set to capture useful images at the predicted CubeSat deployment tumble. The one caveat is that good lighting would be necessary, so we learned that the CubeSat would need to be deployed when the spacecraft's deploying side is illuminated by the sun.
