Mini Satellites Could Revolutionize Space Industry

An anonymous reader writes "Space Daily reports that University of Toronto researchers are working on a project that could replace conventional satellites with a miniature version no larger than a milk carton. From the article: "At only 3.5 kilograms, the Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment 2 (CanX-2) will test small, low-power devices that could lay the groundwork for flying formations of small satellites that could eventually replace larger, more expensive satellites."

Comments

In what way is this new?

[Pipedings]

Sure, smaller satellites, smaller payload => cheaper.

I fail to see why formations of smaller satellites should be a new development. If smaller types could accomplish the mission of bigger ones, the big ones wouldn't be up there (carrying large antennae, big lenses or whatever).

Two Danish micro satellites.

[Saggi]

Denmark has all ready send two micro satellites. They measure only 10x10x10 cm!

They were send up 30. June 2003, along with some commercial satellites and were created as student experiments from "Danmarks Tekniske Universitet" (DTU) and "Aalborg Universitet" (AAU). The goal was to see if you could bring them up there and communicate with them.

You can read more about the two satellites here:

http://dtusat.dtu.dk/
http://www.cubesat.auc.dk/

Re:Great but....

[eddy]

Don't know about these, but Sweden is doing research on micro-satellites and those can be deployed within an hour or two using a normal jet-fighter (Viggen/JAS)

escape velocity for microsatellites with ion drive

[zardo]

I think somebody needs to develop an ion engine for micro-satellites, then universities may be able to afford rockets like the spacex falcon1 which puts their satellite into low-earth orbit, where it uses the ion engine to build up its speed for escape velocity. Perhaps this is the next "killer app" for these private space enthusiasts. So far JPL is the only place to find a highly efficient ion engine. They just came up with a high efficiency, high-power design for project prometheus. Ion engine micro-satellite, watch for them.

Satellite arrays

[FirienFirien]

The arrays mentioned here are a nifty piece of lateral thinking. Compare them to the giant detector arrays on earth; if you have two detectors a large distance apart, you effectively increase the aperture size to that large.

There's similar projects widely spread around the globe; by combining information from a wide array of detectors, you can eliminate significant swathes of atmospheric noise, and since you know which direction the arrays are pointing in, you can correct for depth errors electronically (ie if one detector is 90 round the earth from another, any signal that comes from that sector of sky will reach the two detectors at slightly different times (unless they happen to be at 45 either side of the signal) and the two signals can be shifted correspondingly to align the actual signal, whether it be emission from a star or the next wow signal.)

On the other hand, a satellite array would probably be non-directional - can't figure off the top of my head how a signal would currently directed from a satellite, since they'd be serving multiple devices at once.... hmm. Seems like with an array you'd have better scope for having a bigger aperture; though you'd get more chance for errors if the signal was coming from a direction further away from the vertical. Comments?