  The design of a CubeSat telescope for academic research purposes must balance
complicated optical and structural designs with cost to maximize performance in
extreme environments. Increasing the CubeSat size (eg. 6U to 12U) will increase
the potential optical performance, but the cost will increase in kind. Recent
developments in diamond-turning have increased the accessibility of aspheric
aluminum mirrors, enabling a cost-effective regime of well-corrected
nanosatellite telescopes. We present an all-aluminum versatile CubeSat
telescope (VCT) platform that optimizes performance, cost, and schedule at a
relatively large 95 mm aperture and 0.4 degree diffraction limited full field
of view stablized by MEMS fine-steering modules. This study features a new
design tool that permits easy characterization of performance degradation as a
function of spacecraft thermal and structural disturbances. We will present
details including the trade between on- and off-axis implementations of the
VCT, thermal stability requirements and finite-element analysis, and launch
survival considerations. The VCT is suitable for a range of CubeSat borne
applications, which provides an affordable platform for astronomy,
Earth-imaging, and optical communications.
