Swayam is a 1-U picosatellite (CubeSat) developed by the undergraduate students of College of Engineering, Pune. They have successfully completed assembly of the flight model having a size of 1-U and weight of 990 grams under the guidance of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in January 2015. The structural design of the satellite, design of its electronic and control systems as well as the manufacturing of the satellite was carried out by the students. The project was completed over a span of 8 years and more than 200 students worked on it. The Satellite was launched by ISRO on June 22, 2016, along with Cartosat-2C by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle C-34 from the second launch pad at Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota, India. The satellite is to be placed in low Earth orbit (LEO) around Earth at a height of 515 km.

The payload of the satellite is point-to-point packet communication with which a user can send and receive messages from one point to other point on the earth. The scientific objective of the satellite is to demonstrate passive attitude control to stabilise and appropriately orient the satellite. This technique is being used for the first time on an Indian Satellite. Another objective is to provide low-earth-orbit channel characterisation in the UHF ham band.

Mission Swayam is the first satellite project of COEP's Satellite Initiative under the CSAT programme. The team consists of students from freshers to seniors and spans all the engineering disciplines in the college. The project is in a true sense an interdisciplinary project. The students in this team are selected after a rigorous selection process. In addition to the academic work the team members dedicatedly work on this project all year round to meet the project deadlines. The team can proudly claim to have published more than 15 research papers in international conferences for last 7 consecutive years.

The Satellite team is divided broadly into five subsystems.

The attitude control system (ACS) controls the dynamic behaviour of satellite like orientation and motion of satellite. In Swayam, the technique of passive magnetic attitude control system (PMACS) is implemented for the first time on an Indian satellite. The uniqueness of the technique is that it controls the orientation of the satellite without any power consumption with reasonable accuracy for communication. It is the scientific mission of the satellite to prove that PMACS is a robust and cost-effective solution for attitude control.

The primary objective of ACS is to attain a configuration favourable for communication to take place. Earth's magnetic field will be used for achieving this. Components of passive ACS include permanent magnets and hysteresis rods. The hysteresis rods are soft magnetic materials which damp the angular oscillations of the satellite and the magnet aligns the antenna along the earth's magnetic field.

To evaluate the attitude behaviour of the satellite in the orbit, the space conditions and dynamic behaviour of the satellite have been simulated through a self-developed software. From the simulation results it has been observed that, the stabilization of the satellite to the prescribed orientation, i.e. antenna along Earth's magnetic field, takes around 15 to 20 days.

ACS uses a MEMS gyroscope for stabilisation detection. Using the data from gyro sensor, the on-board computer declares stability of the satellite.