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

Hardly Pico

[Metabolife]

10cm across, these aren't even micro.

So what is the purpose?

[Cthefuture]

I briefly looked at some of the sats going up and I can't see what the point of them is. Just send them up and see if you can read the beacon? What's the point? We already know we can do that. Send back some data on system status and such? WTF?

As an amateur operator myself I would like to see something useful up there instead of more junk. Cameras, telescopes, sensors, repeaters, or something even more useful that the students come up with. I mean if you're going through all the expense at least put some creative effort into it.

Re:So what is the purpose?

[fermion]

building working space hardware is difficult. You may think that getting that robot ready for the wars is difficult, but that is nothing when compared to creating hardware that can survive launch, insertion, and LEO enviroment, much less produce useful results.

We see in the sheer ignorance of the average person when our president says we will have happy moon bases in a few years, or when others say manned space travel is unneccesary, or the space station is just a waste. Space is generally beyond our compreshension and outside of common experience. We will always insert assumptions in our design, assumption that come from real expereince, and those assumption will cost us missions. The only way to conteract those assumption is through experience. Expensive, time consuming, fustrating, with no monetary profit, experience.

And this is why such project are so important. Space develop is generally stagnant because most of the people who have real experience are old. How many people under thirty do you know that have build a sattilite? How do we expect to explore space if the only people with space experience are locked up in government laboratories?

People complain tha all NASA does is PR stuff. Then someone tries to do real space work, for the sole purpose of building experience in space, and created authentic human experience, the same people complain it is a waste of money. Most of what every engineer does in school is a waste of money. It has mostly been done before. But before we can shoot a person to mars, someone has to have launched a little sattilite in orbit. As a person who build rockets since childhood, and had the opportunity to work on a sattilite, I can tell you that no matter how little the sattilite actually did, the exeperience is invaluable. And if we are going to have a working space program, we have to college kids the opportunity to work on real space hardware. Otherwise we can just shut down the space program, which, of course, is what a lot of people want. More money to kill them foreners, ya know.

Re:So what is the purpose?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of the designers of the Illinois ION satellite. Part of the purpose of these projects is to give students an opportunity to do space applications, not easy to come by at most universities. Also, most satellites *do* have actual functions. Some take data for university research, and some test out new concepts in space engineering. There are uses for these things, its more than orbital litter.

Re:So what is the purpose?

[Cthefuture]

Yeah but this is like being in automotive engineering class and building a modern car with wooden wheels. The students need the experience of building a car but we already have vast knowledge on how to build a car. Since they are starting with a huge base of knowledge, at least make it functional otherwise the experience is lacking.

In other words, we already have the technology (modern tires in my example), why not use it and create something that is at least partly useful?

I'm not complaining about students getting experience. I'm complaining that we're talking about a huge opportunity not being fully taken advantage of. The hard part and expense is in the transport up to space, not the satellite. Although satellites are certainly not trivial, we have the experience and technology to make them useful relatively easily.

I mean, doing something more complex than a beacon would be useful experience in learning to create remote probes, robots, and all sorts of stuff. Even if they failed it would be good experience. Beacons are not that useful.

Re:So what is the purpose?

[twostar]

actually most of the industry doesn't believe you can make a satellite this small useful. I saw many people tell us it was impossible to put a fully redundant 430Mhz transceiver and the complete CDH on a 4"x4" board. That's about the time we would hand the board to them and point to the other board with the antenna and power hooked up and transmitting at that time.

Also, almost every CubeSat runs on batteries that have never been space qualified or flow before. Most of the components are not "space qualified" because they don't want to radiation harden them. CubeSats are set to prove you don't need all that extra crap. Just design them well, design them to recover from events, and build them at a fraction of the cost of the specialty stuff.

Impact

[dark grep]

Very good, a bunch of unstearable, 10cm objects traveling at orbital velocity, that will be all but undetectable when their batteries run down. I think about 20cm of steel plate would stop one - or several astronauts in line.

Re:97.4 degree inclination??? Why?

[DerekLyons]

Why are they using a 97.43 degree inclination?

Most likely because that's the orbit the real payload is going into - hitchikers (like these picosats) can rarely afford to be choosy.