Álvaro Hanekan Gómez, a student of Industrial Technology Engineering at the ETSI of the University of Seville, designed and built from scratch a Flight Termination System (FTS) module for CubeSats as his final-year project. The system ensures a controlled separation of the vehicle from its launch system by activating a burn-wire mechanism that melts the payload line.
The module uses a redundant architecture with a ProASIC3 FPGA as controller and an SX1280 LoRa transceiver for communication with the ground. The work covered simulation in LTspice, PCB design in Altium Designer, prototype manufacturing, and laboratory tests at ambient temperature and at -25 °C.
According to the article, the module is designed for a FyCUS mission in which a CubeSat deployed from helium balloons aims to validate an air-breathing electric thruster in orbit. The project, supervised by José María Hinojo Montero and Fernando Muñoz Chavero (Department of Electronic Engineering), received the top mark of 10 with honours and was selected for the New Space España 2026 conference, held in Vigo on 24 and 25 September.
Read the original at Sevilla, capital espacial (Ayuntamiento de Sevilla)