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Move, Starlink. SpaceX's global Internet game may have caught the world's attention with its launch of 60 satellites last month, but we did not know it had already been outclassed – at least in terms of numbers. The KickSat-2 project put in space 105 months earlier 105 tiny "femtosats", the culmination of a multi-year project initiated by a graduate student.
KickSat-2 was Zac Manchester's second attempt, currently a professor at Stanford, to test what he considers to be an important part of the new space economy: the ultra-tiny satellites.
Of course, the four-inch CubeSat standard is small … and devices like Swarm Technologies SpaceBEE are even smaller. But the satellites tested by Manchester are tiny. We are talking here about the size of Triscuit – maybe Wheat Thin, or even Cheez-It.
The KickSat project began in 2011, when Manchester and his colleagues organized a Kickstarter project to raise funds for approximately 300 "Sprite" satellites that would be launched in the space and deployed on behalf of donors. It was a success, but unfortunately, once a problem was launched, the satellites had burned out before their deployment. Manchester was not discouraged and the project continued.
He worked with Cornell University and NASA Ames to redefine the configuration. To do this, his collaborator, Andy Filo, was rewarded for his ingenious 3D printed deployment mechanism. The Sprites themselves are relatively simple things: they are essentially an unshielded printed circuit board with a solar panel, antennas and integrated electronic components for sending and receiving signals.
The "mothership" was launched in November to the ISS, where he spent several months waiting for an opportunity to deploy. This opportunity came on March 17th: the 105 sprites were all launched in a low Earth orbit, where they began to communicate with each other and (hardly) with ground stations.
The deployment would have looked like this … sort of. Probably a little slower.
This is not the beginning of a semi-permanent constellation of thousands of people – the satellites all burned a few days later, as expected.
"It was mainly a test of deployment and communication systems for Sprites," Manchester explained in an email to TechCrunch. The satellites tested two different signals: "Specially designed CDMA signals that allow hundreds of Sprites to simultaneously communicate with a single ultra-long-range ground station with very low power" and "Simpler signals for networking." short range between sprites in orbit. "
The Cygnus spacecraft with the attached KickSat-2 CubeSat – it's the little gold thing right next to the docking arm.
This proof of concept is important – it seems logical and practical to pack dozens or hundreds of these objects into future missions, where they can be released in controlled trajectories providing detection capabilities or communications relays to other spacecraft. And, of course, as we have already seen, the smaller and the cheaper the spacecraft, the easier it is for people to access space for whatever reason: scientific, economic or simply for the worst.
"We have shown that it is possible for tiny, inexpensive satellite swarms to one day accomplish tasks now entrusted to larger and more expensive satellites, making it affordable for virtually nil. anybody for putting into orbit instruments or experiments, "said Manchester in a Stanford. Press release. With the reduction in launch costs, you may not be able to take ownership of your own Sprite.
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