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I was curious about radiation and temperature affecting a phone that is "bolted to the bottom" but it appears to be more TFS lies. In the FAQs, they say that the phone is against a panel looking through a "port hole" and that they have taken radiation into account which means it is shielded somehow, even though they don't say how exactly.

Mission Page

and

FAQ

I was curious about radiation and temperature affecting a phone that is "bolted to the bottom" but it appears to be more TFS lies. In the FAQs, they say that the phone is against a panel looking through a "port hole" and that they have taken radiation into account which means it is shielded somehow, even though they don't say how exactly.

Take a look at Surrey Satellite Technology http://www.sstl.co.uk./ They have a selection of standard platforms and payloads (or BYO payload). Their standard platforms/payloads focus is EO and Comm/Nav, but not limited to those.

However, if you go to any of the majors, they'll also start with a standard bus; they just don't market that part heavily because the value/money is elsewhere. I doubt there are very many commercial sats/payloads built on a one-off/custom bus these days. Those that are most likely are relatively high volume (e.g., GPS, Iridium, etc.). (Hughes started doing that long ago for comm sats).

SSTL can design and build you two satellites for that price. I'm sure there are similar companies here in the US.

Around 30 years ago NASA was messing with the Multimission Modular Spacecraft (MMS), which was in use for 10+ years. Some 10 years ago there was a lot of activity around the highly modular SMEX-Lite bus for smaller missions. On the other side of the pond, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. has been doing cheap, highly modular spacecraft buses since the early 1980s. The US DoD and its various contractors have played with the idea at various times in the last couple of decades as well, most recently in the guise of "operationally responsive space" and "plug-and-play spacecraft". Needless to say, the concept is not particularly new. It just waxes and wanes in popularity depending on what kind of tradeoffs between mission cost and mission performance are acceptable.

Hate to break it to you, but so-called "picosats" have already been launched. They are indeed in the 1kg mass range. You're also right that "femtosats" are on the cards. See here for one of the more popular mass classification schemes. I'm eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first "yoctosat"...

There is already a trend. Surrey Satellite Technology and the University of Surrey have been building and launching micro satellites since 1981, often using COTS components.

It's a booming commercial area.

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. is a world leader in spacecraft design. They regularly sell to the US Air Force, and have a number of American companies running scared (it's not uncommon to hear US companies state that they "aim to be the Surrey of the US" at trade shows and conferences).

1. It takes a long time to get a satellite up, and chasing new technology will just make it take longer.
2. It is not a given that a new technology will provide benefits for a given mission. There are interactions between different elements of the design that may mean that a certain technology is not appropriate for the mission in question (the demands of EP on solar arrays being a prime example of this kind of negative interaction).
3. The temptation is always to cram as much capability as possible into the satellite, instead of providing the minimum capability required. This is especially true of government satellites since the requirements are typically ill-defined to begin with (at least in my experience).

These reasons apply to US government space programs. For an alternative approach, you might look at Surrey Satellite Technologies Ltd in the UK. They build and launch things quickly, have a well-defined strategy for integrating new technologies into spacecraft in a low-risk fashion and getting rapid flight-test information on them, make good use of the technologies appropriate to a mission instead of getting wedded to any one tech, and are extremely good at nailing down their requirements and building only what is needed. IMHO they are the best, and most innovative satellite manufacturer in the world today (and no, I don't work for them - although I'd do so in a heartbeat if I ever moved to the UK).

To being things slighly back on-topic, it's probably worth noting that SSTL has the contract to develop a testbed satellite for the Galileo system (the European competitor to GPS).

1. It takes a long time to get a satellite up, and chasing new technology will just make it take longer.
2. It is not a given that a new technology will provide benefits for a given mission. There are interactions between different elements of the design that may mean that a certain technology is not appropriate for the mission in question (the demands of EP on solar arrays being a prime example of this kind of negative interaction).
3. The temptation is always to cram as much capability as possible into the satellite, instead of providing the minimum capability required. This is especially true of government satellites since the requirements are typically ill-defined to begin with (at least in my experience).

These reasons apply to US government space programs. For an alternative approach, you might look at Surrey Satellite Technologies Ltd in the UK. They build and launch things quickly, have a well-defined strategy for integrating new technologies into spacecraft in a low-risk fashion and getting rapid flight-test information on them, make good use of the technologies appropriate to a mission instead of getting wedded to any one tech, and are extremely good at nailing down their requirements and building only what is needed. IMHO they are the best, and most innovative satellite manufacturer in the world today (and no, I don't work for them - although I'd do so in a heartbeat if I ever moved to the UK).

To being things slighly back on-topic, it's probably worth noting that SSTL has the contract to develop a testbed satellite for the Galileo system (the European competitor to GPS).

Yeah, I wondered too about this 136 pound microsatellite
The first ARRL satellite, Oscar 1 was 10 pounds and the size of a shoe box. Mind you it could only say HI, and couldn't hear your reply, so I guess we've had some progress in 44 years...

Indeed, SNAP was the first satellite to be called a nano-satellite I believe. Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited will also launch the first pico-satellite named PALMSAT. They have been commissioned to build many of Galileo's satellites, Europe's arriving GPS system.

http://www.sstl.co.uk/index.php?loc=47 Surrey satellites have been making micro-satellites and nano-satellites for a while. So what's new?

Yeap.

They launched the 6kg SNAP a few years back, I was one of the early designers of that little guy. They actually put 3 momentum wheels for tri-axis attitude control on it eventually.

http://sstl.co.uk// /me worked there about 10 years back when they were beginning to bloom.....

What is interesting is that this isn't even a new concept.

Forget about Heinlein and other authors who have talked about this before (which unfortunately was only brought up by one enlightened /. poster so far), this has already happened, but admittedly on a much smaller scale so far.

In 1993, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as part of the advertiseing for the movie "Last Action Hero", had his name put on the side of a rocket that went up to LEO.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Schwarzen egger+rocket+advertising+%22Last+Action+Hero%22 (Cached)
http://www.intouchgroup.com/press/Mar8_93-2.html
http://centaur.sstl.co.uk/SSHP/sshp_fun.htm

The point here is that regulating advertisement beyond this is just a matter of scale, rather than anything that has any substance. And when the vehicles themselves get so big that they are visible from LEO? (Aka like the "mothership" in Red Dwarf?)

What about the NASA "meatball" logo that is plastered to the side of each space shuttle? What about Boeing logos on all Delta rockets? Space Ship One had a whole bunch of stuff on its side, including ads for Virgin Galactic and the X-Prize itself. Should that be banned as well?

While by itself this sort of advertising is not going to pay for activities in space, it will make a marginally profitable company be able to run in the black.

The #1 think I that is going to blow the FAA regulations out of the water is that it is going to be unenforcable, unless the U.S. Air Force is going to assert American soverignty over all LEO patterns that cross visually over U.S. territory. I wouldn't put it past the current administration to do something bold like that, but the implications to that level of enforcement would be counter productive and dangerous to America itself.

Both the US and the former-Soviets have programs to dispose of ICBMs through commercial-use conversions. The US turns Peacekeeper ICBMs into Taurus launch vehicles. Stanford University launched a bunch of picosats on the first Minotaur - a hybrid of the Minuteman ICBM and Pegasus upper stages. The DNEPR has launched a couple of small satellites already, and has a number of Cubesats on-deck. You can coordinate getting a Cubesat on a DNEPR launch through OSSS or TransOrbital.

You may want to take a look at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd before you make that assertion. SSTL has loads of experience, a knack for keeping costs low, and a reputation for innovation. They are already trying to move out of the pure smallsat market, and are also making a push into the US market.

Having said all that, what Lockheed really needs to look out for is Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in the UK. They started as a university program about 20 years ago, but they're now a full-fledged company that is well-known for innovative designs and cost-cutting measures. They have launched about 25 satellites so far, have the contract for the Galileo constellation prototypes, and are pushing into the US market (they've already done several projects for the USAF). Definitely a company to keep an eye on.

Yes, a single Mars mission would be more economical as a sling-shot journey. But, we can assume more than one mission would be necessary in order to gain any worthwhile scientific understanding of the red planet.

A Moon base could expedite multiple missions by providing training/living facilities, valuable extraterrestrial storage space(for fuel, oxygen, supplies), and a sixth of the gravity. Also, the possibilities for non-Mars related missions associated with a Moon base are awesome: larger, further reaching telescopes, hydrogen propellent via polar lunar ice, communications relay via microsatellites... For more info: some NASA site.

On a full tangent, current technology is not feasible for multiple missions to Mars: it is obvious that we need to use more efficient long-distance propulsion systems. Let me know what you find...

In 1995, I put together an animation of a satellite my company was working on. I used POVray running on DOS, and wrote a little pair of programs that would hand off render-jobs to different computers. I used 16 computers (mostly P60's) lying around the office to render about 400 frames total. The whole job took about 35 hours of wall time, which was important because I had only three 1/2 days to tweak my small demo & make a final rendering.

I didn't know network programming, so all communication was through read/writing a few networked control files. One acted as a semaphore - if you had sucessfully written your computer ID to it, you could modify the main to-do-list file. One specialized computer was assigned the task of copying the finshed files onto my new 810MB laptop's hard drive; otherwise the file server didn't have enough space for all the .TGA files.

It was a fun project & I've got it included on my resume. Today it sounds kindof trivial, so I've had to explain that general-purpose clustering tools weren't available then. I guess Beouwulf beat me to it by a year (and a zillion-fold on capability), so I was wrong. Information travelled so much slower those days...

According to this page from Surrey Satellite Systems, UoSAT-2 runs on a Microsoft platform. Doesn't that make it an evil entity on slashdot?

UoSAT-2 was not a Nasa mission. It was built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in Guildford, a University town just west of London. We've grown quite a bit since then. We specialize in building small satellites (think 100 kgs, not 1000's of kgs). It's a different way of doing things to the way NASA and ESA usually does, but it's catching on.

that does seem like one hell of an expensive microsat deal. the microsats i deal with HERE are no where near that expensive. (this is not advertising, because i am not an employee, or related to this company, other than by marriage)

You can check out their website here. Most of their real money-making launches have been Earth imaging of one sort or another (e.g. their current big project - the Disaster Monitoring Constellation - is all about responsive Earth imaging). However, they've also flown several scientific and experimental payloads, they just landed a contract to do some of the prototype work on Galileo, and have a good business helping other countries get space programs up and running in a short amount of time.

The X-prize is a philanthropic donation made by a bunch of really rich guys. This kind of money will help us achieve certain milestones, but once they've been achieved it will vanish. Unless we can find buisiness in space, it won't work as it did with airplanes because people don't NEED to go to space, nor does much mail need delivering.

The X-prize is modeled after the prizes that kick-started aviation in the early decades of the 20th century. It's not intended to last forever, it's intended to provide the impetus for developing things that will be self-sustaining, but aren't self-starting. People don't NEED to go into the air either - but it gets them there faster. Cheap suborbital transportation could drastically reduce point-to-point travel times. In an age of global business and "just-in-time" everything, that seems like it could make some money. I'm sure Fedex would happily charge a premium for "same-hour, anywhere in the world" service too.

These companies are aiming to serve the comsat community, which isn't doing anything really spectacular when you think of it. I agree that the technology and achievement is cool, but they're not breaking any new ground.

Read my comment again. I said smallsat launcher. Smallsats are not usually used as comsats (with the possible exception of Orbcomm), since comsats need massive amounts of power that smallsats don't have. My point was that several companies believe that there is enough of a market for smallsat launches that they're trying hard to win that market. I don't know what the business plan of all those smallsat customers is, but I can tell you that cheap, responsive launches and rapidly built smallsats open up business possibilities that don't exist right now.

They launched 1 guy, once. The other two potential customers (Lance Bass and that guy from South Africa) couldn't afford it and decided it wasn't worth the cost respectively. Given NASA's new failures, you're not going to see any new tourists in space any time soon. All this also neglects the fact that these tourists were riding on government funded infrastructure, and their costs only paid a fraction of a percent of the costs of the entire program.

Two, actually. Mark Shuttleworth went up last year. Both Tito's and Shuttleworth's tickets more than covered the cost of their flights. Sure, two flights doesn't cover the cost of the program. But two flights doesn't cover the cost of a 747 either. It's all about volume. And NASA's shuttle woes won't do a whole lot to the Russian space program - the Soyuz is well known to be far more robust than the fickle shuttle.

They're still going to lose a bundle on developing and launching the system. This is done out of nationalistic neccesity, not to be a commercially viable competitor to GPS. And few private companies today could muster the resources to launch such a program, even if the returns were guaranteed and the risks of failure were much lower than they are now.

I wouldn't be so sure about the ROI on Galileo. Sure there won't be an immediate return, but I suspect they could pay for it over the long haul. Particularly if aircraft start getting into precision GPS approaches. That's a very large number of subscriptions right there. And there are lots of other businesses that would probably be willing

I don't believe that's actually always the case. I have a friend who works for the Surrey Space Centre on very small satellites - I was chatting to him down the pub about it one day and I was quite surprised to find out that it ran on an ordinary StrongArm Chip running at something like 133Mhz (Sorry - I don't recall the exact speed).

However, I suppose it's possible that the nanosatellite they built was sufficiently close to the earth to be sheilded from the radiation you speak of...

If you have to reboot the entire thing you're fucked, right.

But if you reboot for a second, the bird won't plummet like a stone anyway: its feedback loops are closed through software normally, but it surely can operate in open loop, where pure analog electronics control the navigation and the feedback is given by the pilot ("classic" approach).

This sort of "redundancy" (not redundancy, but implementation of different functions in more than one way) is commonplace in space design, even unmanned (satellites).

For example, here at Surrey Satellite we use a microcontroller to keep the solar arrays of our satellites in their Maximum Power Point. In case of a failure, we still keep them near that point using pure analog, ie, measuring temperature and doing an estimation with opamps.

BBCnews reported some time ago on such a posible role for Surrey Satellite Technology's nanosatellite SNAP program. A swarm of cheap (at about 100,000 UK sterling) manuverable tiny satellites that can latch onto and gradually deorbit junk.

How though could such carry enough reaction mass to actually slow something down enough? Info on its propulsion system is here (pdf). Could you just do it via its flywheel? Or use such to cluster together junk for collection by something bigger?I could certainly see a role as a beacon to actively tag stuff (on the net even!)rather than relying upon constant ground based monitoring.

BBCnews reported some time ago on such a posible role for Surrey Satellite Technology's nanosatellite SNAP program. A swarm of cheap (at about 100,000 UK sterling) manuverable tiny satellites that can latch onto and gradually deorbit junk.

How though could such carry enough reaction mass to actually slow something down enough? Info on its propulsion system is here (pdf). Could you just do it via its flywheel? Or use such to cluster together junk for collection by something bigger?I could certainly see a role as a beacon to actively tag stuff (on the net even!)rather than relying upon constant ground based monitoring.

BBCnews reported some time ago on such a posible role for Surrey Satellite Technology's nanosatellite SNAP program. A swarm of cheap (at about 100,000 UK sterling) manuverable tiny satellites that can latch onto and gradually deorbit junk.

How though could such carry enough reaction mass to actually slow something down enough? Info on its propulsion system is here (pdf). Could you just do it via its flywheel? Or use such to cluster together junk for collection by something bigger?I could certainly see a role as a beacon to actively tag stuff (on the net even!)rather than relying upon constant ground based monitoring.

I've been designing electronics for aerospace for years both at government facilities and at private companies like my present, Surrey Satellite. Yes, in this small company we make entire spacecrafts, from micro and mini satellites (LEO) to big GEOs hopefully soon.

..And let me tell you that it is quite funny to hear the term "AMATEUR SATELLITE". Come on, what the hell is this supposed to be? If you put a satellite out in space and have it working for a couple of years then you are not an amateur regardeless of any other consideration.

Not at all! Lifetime of most space missions is limited due to the degradation of the different systems, specially the battery modules, even although often operated at a 15% to 25% depth of discharge. I am a power systems design engineer working for SSTL and we design our systems for the lifetime specified (plus some margin to play with..)

SSTL's nano/microsatellites might play a role here. SNAP-1 manouvered about a couple of satellites taking snaps, Its due to rendezvous with another SSTL sat soon, one of its potential roles could be tagging/deorbiting junk.

SSTL's nano/microsatellites might play a role here. SNAP-1 manouvered about a couple of satellites taking snaps, Its due to rendezvous with another SSTL sat soon, one of its potential roles could be tagging/deorbiting junk.

SSTL's nano/microsatellites might play a role here. SNAP-1 manouvered about a couple of satellites taking snaps, Its due to rendezvous with another SSTL sat soon, one of its potential roles could be tagging/deorbiting junk.

I believe the benefits of small sats is that you can put several of them on a single launch vehicle, and reduce the launch costs that way. Of course you need a launch system capable of carrying a number of smaller payloads - which there aren't very many of right now.

As far as I know the best for doing that are not US built which is why Surrey Space over in England are making a killing right now in the nanosat category.

Jedidiah

(details are sparse on the net)

The companies web site seems like a good place to start.

• Sapphire from Stanford and Washington University at St. Louis, the "group of graduate schools" satellite
• PicoSat for the STP (Space Test Program) was built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, the "one from the Department of Defense"
• PCsat
• Starshine III

Check the University of Surrey's info on nanosatellites. SNAP-1 has been doing very nicely by all accounts, breaking some records up there. More info at Space Daily.

If I had the opportunity to do this I wouldn't even blink. My Uni (Surrey, in the UK) has recently got ntl to cable up all the student rooms on campus.

I now have a phone in my room and a RJ45 socket. The cable runs as far as where the hub should be but the Uni apparently doesn't have enough money to put the backbone infrastructure in for a couple more years. Next year will be the cable modem though :-)

But they do manufacture their own satellites, 'cos obviously that's pretty cheap to do ;-(

wrighty.

"I am Jack's smirking revenge"

Note that most of these are NIR red, green false-colour images - i.e. red regions are grass/vegetation and the light blue is the built up areas.

My favourite is the one image of Washington DC and surrounding area captured in July, clearly showing the White House, Jefferson Memorial and National Mall leading to the US Capitol.

These are all JPG's - if you have the bandwidth to burn you can download the bitmaps here.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

Note that most of these are NIR red, green false-colour images - i.e. red regions are grass/vegetation and the light blue is the built up areas.

My favourite is the one image of Washington DC and surrounding area captured in July, clearly showing the White House, Jefferson Memorial and National Mall leading to the US Capitol.

These are all JPG's - if you have the bandwidth to burn you can download the bitmaps here.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

Note that most of these are NIR red, green false-colour images - i.e. red regions are grass/vegetation and the light blue is the built up areas.

My favourite is the one image of Washington DC and surrounding area captured in July, clearly showing the White House, Jefferson Memorial and National Mall leading to the US Capitol.

These are all JPG's - if you have the bandwidth to burn you can download the bitmaps here.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

As someone in one of the threads replied the application as stated in the article is for post-evaluation of an incident so I won't dwell on that.

You are quite right that the satellite will only be covering a certain area at a certain time - all dependant on the orbit... As some of you may be aware, a satellite (or any object orbiting the earth) has an orbit period determined by its altitude. The higher the altitude - the longer it takes to orbit the earth. Some figures: a typical LEO (Low Earth orbit) satellite at an altitude of about 800km will have an orbit period of approximately 100 minutes. Geo-stationary satellites on the other hand has a 24 hour orbit period but has to be at a very high altitude - 35786 km to be precise!

To get back to the point. For high resolution imaging you would like to be as close as possible to earth. Obviously this will bring the complexity and cost of your optics down - and believe me, it is expensive! But you have to consider that a LEO implies a fast orbit with some advantages and disadvantages.

A LEO orbit (600-1200km) has the advantage that the satellite's footprint will cover most of the earth in approximately 12 hours. As you need daylight for good imaging, your coverage (for imaging at least) goes up to 24 hours in practice. Allowing for good weather you can see the problem for a quick turnaround time for images e.g. car pile up example stated in the article.

Even a constellation of imaging satellites may proof to be impractical, you'll need quite a few satellites ($$$) to have an image within a few hours. In a previous /. article about this 1m resolution imager (Ikonos) you'll notice that they claim to have the image ready within 30 minutes. What they don't say is that they'll have it ready in 30 minutes after the image has been captured. Impossible to take the image of a certain target within 30 minutes of requesting it!!

IMHO visual forensics (using satellite imaging) will only be practical if the 'crime scene' stay's the way it is for a prolonged time. I can't imagine rescue services waiting for hours until an imaging satellite comes over the horizon before clearing up the debris!!

If you're interested please visit my company's homepage for some earth observation images taken with our LEO satellites over the years. Please note we're not close to 1m resolution - currently 30m multi-spectral and a 10m b/w experimental imager.

I'll be happy to answer more questions if anyone's is interested.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,