Cubesat 10x10x10cm 1kg Payload, Lets here it then... |
Cubesat 10x10x10cm 1kg Payload, Lets here it then... |
Sep 15 2005, 06:53 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 562 Joined: 29-March 05 Member No.: 221 |
I'm sure many of you will be familar with the CubeSat project, in fact some of you may well have worked on one.
So lets hear it, what would you do with a 10x10x10cm 1kg payload in a CubeSat, beside the obvious like stick a camera in it and photograph your house. Who knows, perhaps one day we may see the launch of the USF CubeSat |
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Sep 15 2005, 08:40 PM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
Oh I LOVE cubesats...I have dozens of PDF's and PPT's about them. Infact, I get email from the Japanese 'Cutesat' which has a tiny camera in it
I'd go with quite a long deployed antenna which would then create a nice gravity gradient to keep the spacecraft orientated to earth - perhaps deployed on a reel. To be honest, I think a camera is going to be the #1 cool thing to have on board, but I'd TRY and do pushbroom - not single shot. Basically - schedule it image at the best time of each orbit based on minutes after the arrays get over a certain voltage. Then, do as much as the memory can handle, and then keep it onboard until the next downlink pass. The real problem is downlink capacity though - it's quite slow. Cubesat's are just - JUST - too small to be brilliant, but a double cube sat ( 20x10x10) probably gives you enough mass and volume to have the power to do good imaging with downlink. Actually - I'm surprised the Planetary Society havnt put together a cubesat proposal - it's just hard to find a scientific goal for one - apart from taking cool picture. Doug |
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Sep 15 2005, 09:25 PM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 562 Joined: 29-March 05 Member No.: 221 |
QUOTE (djellison @ Sep 15 2005, 09:40 PM) Actually - I'm surprised the Planetary Society havnt put together a cubesat proposal - it's just hard to find a scientific goal for one - apart from taking cool picture. Doug The cool pictures part is of course paramount. Heck slap a bunch of filters on it and you got your self some multispectral capability. However instead of looking inward, why not look out. Why not turn it in to a dedicated multispectral planetary scope. Kind of the equivalent of a webcam + telescope beloved of amateurs but in space. The science goals could be to image all the planets in 6 wavelengths. Pick at least one that can't be done from the ground due to the atmosphere and use that as your rational. Regarding Jupiter storm observations, you metioned that there was interesting amateur work being done on storm rotation velocities from the ground using amateur kit, well do it from space instead. OK so a mini observatory in space is going to be far more complicated, however, gyros for these CubeSats are an off the shelf component, you could even make sure that if all the pointing capacity failed you could still do earth observation, by having a default gradient stable postition for which the camera pointed at the earth. Of course this is still pretty picture science but not beyond the realm of possibility |
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