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Arduino Enables a Low-Cost Space Revolution
RocketAcademy writes "Arduino, the popular open-source microcontroller board, is powering a revolution in low-cost space-mission design. San Francisco-based Planet Labs, a spinoff of NASA's PhoneSat project, has raised $13 million to launch a flock of 28 Arduino-based nanosatellites for remote sensing. Planet Labs launched two test satellites this spring; Flock-1 is scheduled to launch on an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket in 2014. NanoSatisifi, also based in San Francisco-based company, is developing the Arduino-based ArduSat, which carries a variety of sensors. NanoSatisifi plans to rent time on ArduSats to citizen scientists and experimenters, who will be able upload their own programs to the satellites. The first ArduSat is scheduled for launch August 4 on a Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle carrying supplies to the International Space Station. The cost of orbital launches remains a limiting factor, however. As a result, Infinity Aerospace has developed the Arduino-based ArduLab experiment platform, which is compatible with new low-cost suborbital spacecraft as well as higher-end systems such as the International Space Station. The non-profit Citizens in Space has purchased 10 flights on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft, which will be made available to the citizen-science community. Citizens in Space is looking for 100 citizen-science experiments and 10 citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators. To help spread the word, it is holding a Space Hacker Workshop in Dallas, Texas on July 20-21. Infinity Aerospace will be on hand to teach Arduino hardware and software."
Which color LED, red, blue, or yellow, can be programmed to blink most rapidly in outer space?
if you can afford to put something into orbit, maybe you can afford to pay a real C programmer
... I guess you can always use weedkiller for artistic purposes, and photograph it from space.
You could afford a real programmer, one that understands machine language. Every lair of abstraction ads complexity.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Waiting for the real science to begin in 3...2... oh wait, never?
Really, what exactly do they think these are actually useful for except for adding 'In Space' to a bunch of
college programming projects? As these dont even use radiation hardened electronics of any ECC, I
suspect investigating failure modes will be their main use.
Come on, the world is full of useful and interesting things to do, this just aint one of them people!
I have seen ridiculous expensive retail SBCs used where a $3 embedded controller, a few square inches of perfboard and a bit of assembly language was all that was needed.
There is lots more than that; solar panels, batteries, regulators, rotation / positioning thrusters, antennas. Then there is temperature management and the housing of the whole thing.
I guess the low power consumption leads to low weight which in turn leads to a cheaper launch cost.
In the end, mother naure will get her revenge. These things won't last long in space.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Nowhere do I see mention of these arduinos being special, radiation-hardened versions. Nowhere, is there mention about extended temperature range, vibration, etc. These are all important if the mission is expected to succeed. Sure, it might be reasonable to expect a certain fatality rate among a flock of launched devices, and do cost accounting to figure out what tradeoffs can be made. I find it difficult, however, to believe that the current cost of launch, by weight, is lower than the cost of providing reliable hardware.
This is not meant to slight Arduino. I think it's great, but it's made to be a low-cost solution for instances where there is not much demand for reliability, and certainly not for such places where there is a demand for reliability under difficult circumstances. This project is a mistake, a waste of money, and courting disaster. I wish that all of those who had senior authority to approve this project to get fired, and to spend some time in hell (Hell is pretty bad. So, on the scale of things, about twenty minutes should do).
Yes but that 3$ controller would have then needed a 3000$ certification that it won't electrocute the user or a 700$/hr specialist coder to tweak a setting. That 500$ pre-certified retail SBC looks like a bargain when anyone can modify the web page it is serving up. If something looks ridiculous to you, ask yourself "Am I the smartest person in the universe, or am I missing some information?"
are you saying that single board computers that consist of a single computer on a chip are getting certified for those reasons?
look, for these it's sat it's totally unnecessary for it to be an "arduino" and not atmel on it's own, except for the easier press value gathered from using the buzzword arduino.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm sure some Googling could find me some basics, but this would be a great chance to hear anecdotally from people who work on this stuff daily - how big of an issue is radiation and the hardening for circuits? What kinds of damage/effects are you having to counter, and how do you go about fixing it? There was a story floating around last month of the phone-based projects that are being launched. Are there certain zones or ranges in the magnetosphere where the radiation hits harder, or becomes a non-issue? And what's considered "good enough" when it comes to hardening?
If there was a band of gold circling the earth and the Ariane space truck could go and get a tonne at a time - it would not be worth it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yeah I never understood that. Arduino is a good platform for testing or prototyping, since you have a lot of things you are going to use already provided on a board, and you can share your design with others that have the same hardware, but once your idea is solid and ready to be reproduced over and over, it just makes sense to build your own circuits around the controller.
Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Sigs are Dangerous to Your Health
That's exactly what I was thinking. Arduinos are development boards. They're supposed to allow you to easily prototype things on them. If you're going to build more than a couple, why would you ever spend $30 on an Arduino board, when you could have your own custom units made in bulk for $10?
Except those embedded controllers are not shielded from possible radiation.
http://lws-set.gsfc.nasa.gov/space_radiation.html#satellites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening
None of our spacecraft or ground equipment is based on Arduino.