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NASA To Develop Small Satellites

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-necessarily-bigger-than-a-breadbox dept.

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.

5 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great, by oodaloop · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  2. Mass appeal by isomeme · · Score: 5, Insightful

    weighing between 11 and 110 pounds

    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 /. knows metric units. Let's go metric-only here. Please.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
    1. Re:Mass appeal by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Attitude and trajectory are controlled by opening and closing the shutters. Commands come from the ground by broadcast messages. You could launch thousands of the things on a single vehicle.
      It would make a great way of concentrating sunlight for solar power. Remind me again how you can change trajectory with aerodynamics in space? You use light pressure. The shutters control the amount of light being reflected from different parts of the vehicle. Light pressure causes the vehicle to rotate. Once a consistent attitude has been established light pressure gives you a velocity change. The whole lot can be done with a few milliwatts of power to control a CPU and sheets of liquid crystal.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. 1 Sat = 5,000,000,000 kg by G4from128k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:Great, by sas-dot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    NASA has to catchup!? Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is launching 10 satellites (including 8 nano) this April 28.