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

Cheap is in the eye of the beholder

[IntelliAdmin]

Wow. After looking through their price sheet it looks like you could build your own cubesat for about $20,000 US. I guess inexpensive is a relative term - still really cheap compared to the prices of a regular satellite. I wonder how much it costs them to get it up in the air.

Windows Admin Tools

Re:Cheap is in the eye of the beholder

[kfg]

. . .about $20,000 US. I guess inexpensive is a relative term. . .

$20,000 is where "cheap" ends in the violin market. The sort of thing you might send your kid to college with, or have made as a "cheap" copy of your "good" violin (a common practice for insurance purposes). I was looking at a mandolin last year that was made in the year I was born, in the city I was born in. It was going for $25,000. Just some bits of carved wood, baroque era tech.

Yes, it's all relative.

KFG

97.4 degree inclination??? Why?

[lecithin]

forcasted orbital elements below. Why are they using a 97.43 degree inclination?

P-POD A
1 99999U 06179.82920000 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 00002
2 99999 097.4300 088.0700 0022000 210.1300 328.3600 15.15090000000016

P-POD B
1 99999U 06179.82920000 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 00002
2 99999 097.4300 088.0700 0035000 210.1495 328.6600 15.12640000000013

P-POD C
1 99999U 06179.82920000 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 0000
2 99999 097.4300 088.0700 0048000 210.1537 328.8600 15.10180000000011

P-POD D
1 99999U 06179.82920000 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 00002
2 99999 097.4300 088.0700 0060000 210.1680 329.0500 15.07710000000019

P-POD E
1 99999U 06179.82920000 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 00002
2 99999 097.4300 088.0700 0073000 210.1857 329.2300 15.05210000000012

Involvement and Interest

[Puff of Logic]

It's always interesting to see space stuff done on a smaller scale. In some ways, it's almost more interesting. For example, while the ISS is cool, chucking a spacesuit out of the airlock to make an impromptu satellite was satisfying on some other level than I usually find, say, the latest Hubble shot. There's probably some key insight here, but I'm too tired to actually engage my brain more fully.

Oh man. Gene Ray is gonna go *nuts*

[Tackhead]

Just what we need. Just one look at those pictures... the non-anti-aliased pictures of the CubeSats...

...can't resist... Brain failing...

The 10x10x10cm, 1kg CubeSat standard... musn't look at pictures. Mustn't - NO! P-POD Allocations for Dnepr L1 campaign is thinking inside the box! Initial Cubesat cluster velocity magnitude measured in thousands of meters per second! CubeSat projects have the potential to educate cubeless participants and implement successful harmonic simultaneous time cube!

And were a smashing success until

[SteeldrivingJon]

they were swallowed by small dog.

I love Pico

[pharwell]

Pico-satellites are way better than Vi-satellites or Emacs-satellites.

Hardly Pico

[Metabolife]

10cm across, these aren't even micro.

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.

They are sure not afraid of magic

[Axe]

13 sattelites on board of a "Satan" rocket. They should have scheduled the launch on July 6, 2006. 06/06/06.

Re:They are sure not afraid of magic

[stoutstreet]

not in Base 0 calendar

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?

[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.

yeah but the real question is

[commodoresloat]

do these satellites run pico/Linux?

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.

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.