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NASA To Develop Small Satellites
coondoggie brings news that NASA has announced it will team with Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corp. to produce small satellites, called 'nanosats,' weighing between 11 and 110 pounds. The satellites will work together in 'constellations' and facilitate networking in space. According to NASA's press release, it will 'develop a fifth generation telecommunications and networking system for Internet protocol-based and related services.' We've discussed miniature satellites in the past.
A 110lb satellite is hardly on par with a nut or a pair of gloves. If we can replace aging satellites with much smaller ones, I would think it would greatly improve the neighborhood up there. If, OTOH, they were planning on putting up a thousand tiny ones to do the job of one big one, that's a horse of a different color.
In any case, my big question is how many nuts are orbiting Uranus?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
weighing between 11 and 110 pounds
/. knows metric units. Let's go metric-only here. Please.
Come on, people. This is a tech site. Can't we please use metric units? This case is especially annoying for two reasons:
1. When the satellites are deployed, their weight will be zero.
2. Those odd range limits -- 11 and 110 pounds -- are obviously Imperial conversions of the more reasonable range 5-50 kg.
We've already crashed one probe into Mars trying to juggle Imperial and metric units. Everyone reading
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Clearly if a nanosat is 5 kg, then 1 sat is a very large unit of mass. On the other hand, given the mass of a typical medium size satellite (call it 500 kg), these are clearly decisats or centisats.
Like you, I hate the corruption of engineering terminology in the hands of marketing. And that NASA, of all groups, would fall for the "nano" = "really small" meme is egregious. Clearly some people need to hand in their geek badges.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
NASA uses satellites for collecting scientific data .. if you want a spinning 5 meter dish (to get good resolution), you're not going to do it on a 5 kg satellite.
NASA designs and builds for long reliable life. Hams can tolerate a lot more risk in exchange for cheaper parts and less rigor.
NASA has certain institutional aspects that push for a fairly large "minimum project size" (e.g. the need to report to Congress, be auditable, verify that the taxpayer isn't getting ripped off) Those institutional costs don't vary very much with satellite size, so bigger means more science for the dollar (a smaller fraction is institutional overhead)
When the launch vehicle costs $100M, one doesn't want to spend $100K on the satellite.
NASA has to catchup!? Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is launching 10 satellites (including 8 nano) this April 28.