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

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!

I love Pico

[pharwell]

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

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.

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.

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