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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.
Just what we need, more ofthis.
I guess it would be more difficult to shoot down a self-healing mesh of small satellites(as opposed to shooting down one big one).
Amateur radio has been doing this for years. They call them microsats and get cheap flight aboard rockets when they get used as ballast.
thanks god some new company has come around to develop ways for machines to talk to each other. I'm betting it involves 'networking protocols' and 'message' packets being passed around. ground breaking shit here.
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.
Satellites weighing 110-1000 pounds will be called "Biggie sats" and those at the top of the scale will be called "Venti Sats".
Operator, give me the number for 911!
A cubic nanometer of water weighs 2.2*10^-24 lbs. I'm guessing that's the approximate weight of the 110 lb satellite (in freefall). That or NASA doesn't consider 26 orders of magnitude anything to worry about.
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.
Mars needs a communication network that will also handle GPS. Since there is little atmosphere, and atomic clock is now chip size, I have been thinking that it would be useful to see the same thing employed around the moon, and then deployed later to mars. Ideally, each sat will have enough size and power left over to handle an extra device, so that each sat or a group of sats might have something unique.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Apparently the trick is not too close and not too far. Low orbits bring down the sat due to grav differences.
OTH, if you are too high or orbit is wrong, then earth plays with it as well.
Thanx for pointing that out. I like to learn.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just what we need, clouds of more objects in LEO. WATCH OUT! Here comes another one!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
SI prefixes have been applied to satellites for a while now. They are used to differentiate satellites based on weight. Instead of three orders-of-magnitude per prefix (e.g., micro -> nano = 10^-3), they are one order-of-magnitude. In general, the classification has been broken like so:
minisatellite: 100 - 1000 kg
micro-: 10 - 100 kg
nano-: 1 - 10 kg
pico-: 100 g - 1 kg
Theoretically, these satellites come down by orders of magnitude in cost, too. An example of a Picosat would be the CubeSat program that a number of colleges have tinkered with - a relatively inexpensive satellite 10 cm to a side that could be launched with a few dozen other cubesats, thus amortizing the launch cost over many participants.