Citizen Satellites (Article Scientific American)
Contents
Tiny,
standardized
spacecraft
are
making
orbital
experiments
affordable
to
even
 the
smallest
research
groups


EVER SINCE SPUTNIK KICKED OFF THE AGE OF SPACE SATELLITES more than fifty years ago, big institutions have dominated the skies. Almost all the many thousands of satellites that have taken their place in Earth orbit were the result of huge projects funded by governments and corporations. For decades each generation of satellites has been more complicated and expensive than its predecessor, taken longer to design, and required an infrastructure of expensive launch facilities, global monitoring stations, mission specialists and research centers. In recent years, however, improvements in electronics, solar power and other technologies have made it possible to shrink satellites dramatically. A new type of satellite, called CubeSat, drastically simplifies and standardizes the design of small spacecraft and brings costs down to less than $100,000 to develop, launch and operate a single satellite--a tiny fraction of the typical mission budget of NASA or the European Space Agency. A CubeSat is about the size of a Beanie Baby box--appropriate, given that until recently, most scientists regarded CubeSats as little more than toys. The idea behind CubeSats is to give satellite developers standard specifications for size and weight and then combine many satellites--each made by a different group of scientists, graduate students, engineers--into a single rocket payload, usually piggybacking on other, more expensive missions that have a bit of room to share. The high expense of the rocket launch thus gets spread out over all the participants, keeping costs low. And the CubeSat design standards allow participants to share design features and know-how and buy components off the shelf. Since the CubeSat concept was introduced, scientists from the U.S., Asia, Europe and Latin America have successfully launched at