13 Pico-Satellites to Launch June 28th

leighklotz writes "The CalPoly CubeSat Program announced a launch date for its 13 amateur satellites: June 28, 2006 at 19:39:11Z, from the Kazakstan Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian DNEPR-1LV rocket. The satellites are made from a kit, and are 10cm cubes." Read on for more info, including links to many of the individual satellite projects.

leighklotz continues: "There are also pictures of 14 satellites and info about some of them:

• ION, University of Illinois
• RINCON, University of Arizona
• ICE Cube 1, Cornell University
• KUTESat [also] University of Kansas
• nCube nCube Norweigian University of Science and Technology
• HAUSAT-1 Hankuk Aviation University
• SEEDS Nihon University
• CP1 and CP2 Cal Poly
• AeroCube 1 The Aerospace Corporation
• Voyager University of Hawaii
• ICE Cube 2 Cornell University

These folks have a list of ongoing CubeSat projects. And as always AMSAT is a good organization to join if you have any interest in using or building your own satellites."

Comments

Re:97.4 degree inclination??? Why?

[rijrunner]

That is a sun synchronous orbit. Fairly useful if you are taking photos. Every time you pass over part of your orbit, the shadows will be at the same angle as your previous pass. Much easier to calculate form and height when you always know the relative angle to the sun.

It is also a useful orbit in that it covers the entire planet, including the poles. If you are interested in items, such as global warming and relative ice-pack, you need to use this sort of orbit.

Not sure if any of the sats in this are configured as Amsats, but this high an inclination could even allow people living in the far north and far south some communcation relay capability.

Re:They are sure not afraid of magic

[stoutstreet]

not in Base 0 calendar

Pico satellite is a satellite size

[twostar]

Large satellite >1000kg
Medium sized satellite 500-1000kg
Mini satellite 100-500kg Small Satellites
Micro satellite 10-100kg
Nano satellite 1-10kg
Pico satellite 0.1-1kg
Femto satellite Smart dust - one cubic millimeter
from the bottom of this article: http://www.pythom.com/news.php?id=1964

Univ. of Arizona Cubesats

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

I programmed the University of Arizona cubesats. We actually have two satellites launching from the Cosmodrome this summer. The first is, as the summary notes, called Rincon. It is named for Rincon Research which provided us much of the funding. Rincon Research is in turn named for the mountain range on the East side of Tucson. The other satellite is called SACRED, and, honestly, I can't actually remember what it stands for. I think it's something in French...

The summary is not entirely correct about the construction of the cubesats. Some are indeed made from the kit, but not all. Ours, for example, were completely designed and built at the UA with the exception of the radio transceivers. SACRED also includes an experiment board designed by the Univ. of Montpelier.

Here's a much better link to a page describing the cubesats:

UA Cubesats

Some of the other posts have been complaining about the purpose of these cubesats. It's true that they are all very simple. But you have to remember that they were designed and built by students (with faculty help, of course). The UA cubesats have PIC 16F877 microcontrollers on board with 64 KB of ferromagnetic storage memory. So, it's understandable that they will be limited.

The Rincon satellite has twelve sensors which monitor voltage, temperature, and current. These will let us know how well the cubesat is working and hopefully allow us to compute its spin rate. SACRED also has an experiment board which will perform some radiation tests on a few electronic components.

These cubesats (the UA's at least) are more than just beacons, as some posters have suggested. I programmed them, so I'm well aware of their capabilities. They have, for their size, a fairly decent command structure and allow for two-way communication. They take measurements on a schedule (which can be modified) and store the results for later transmission to the ground station in Tucson, Arizona. For the extra curious among you, you can read the cubesat manual I wrote for our project:

Cubesat II Operating System Owner's Manual

The Magic of Secondary Payloads

[chrisd]

The dnepr costs about #11.7m USD to launch, and it can lift a whole whack of weight to leo, so people like using it (it's cheap compared to other options) and there is often weight allowance left over. Its really cool that they opened this up to students.

Chris

Correction - Ukrainian Rocket

[alexmin]

Developed by Pivdenmash - see http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Ukraine/Mis sile/2164_3853.html

Errors and Omissions

[leighklotz]

I'm pleased that so many of the principals involved in the Cubesat program have joined this discussion.

I didn't know that they CubeSat Kits were unrelated to the current activities, but more importantly, I want to apologize for omitting the 14th satellite, MEROPE from Montana State University. I want to thank Brian Larsen of MSU for pointing this out to me, and I hope Brian joins this discussion.

One thing I learned about all this activity around space, satellites, and its intersection with computer science and other technologies is that at least among people who are skilled enough in all those disciplines to get a satellite into orbit, amateur radio is still interesting.