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.

Comments

Mass appeal

[isomeme]

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.

1 Sat = 5,000,000,000 kg

[G4from128k]

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.