Questions tagged [cubesat]
Type of satellite in the shape of a cube 10 cm on each side. Popular with academics and amateurs with a focus on off-the-shelf components.
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What is the effective "range" of a Falcon Heavy rocket with a very small payload?
Theoretically, If I decided to blow millions of dollars on a Falcon Heavy launch, simply to launch a 2kg cubesat as far as possible, how far could i send the payload assuming no gravity assists?
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Local space radiation measurement by 1U CubeSat
As far as I know, the general influx of ionizing radiation received by a CubeSat in LEO is mostly trapped protons and electrons, solar protons, galactic cosmic radiation, and
neutrons. If the CubeSat ...
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What body of regulations (if any) would apply to a cubesat with an SDR on board?
For example: the FUNcube Dongle Pro+ is a USB Software Defined Radio receiver, or SDR. It provides a digitized 192kHz wide chunk of IF (intermediate frequency) via high speed USB interface. Generally ...
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Moon landing with ion thrusters
In Kerbal space program I built a mini cubesat (similar to NASA’s lunar flashlight probe) and managed to land on the moon only using ion thrusters. However, it was risky because it took a few tries. ...
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What is the longest working cubesat?
For example VZLUSAT-1 is 5 years old and it is still working.
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Are the Artemis 1 secondary payloads still viable?
Artemis 1 carries ten cubesats as secondary payloads. One of the concerns prior to the last rollback, in September, was that the batteries were almost out of charge and that there was no way to ...
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How to compute orbital decay of a cubesat?
I'd like to compute the orbital decay of a cubesat in LEO/VLEO due to atmospheric drag. Here is what I've done:
Based on the Satellite Orbital Decay Calculations document coming from the Australian ...
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what is the cheapest transmitter for a cubesat?
I'm building a CubeSat and it's halfway built. I've got a launch for February 2023, and I need a transmitter. If I don't get a transmitter on this thing, the CubeSat will ride to orbit and immediately ...
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I'm building a CubeSat for a short 8-day mission in LEO followed by a fairly quick reentry, what range of orbits to consider?
The goal of this CubeSat mission is to demonstrate CubeSat construction, operation, and communication in Low Earth orbit for 8 days or longer.
Why the short mission time? Because the mission lacks ...
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Have any satellites had lights visible from Earth besides FITSat-1?
Clearly not a duplicate! of Why does the International Space Station have a downward facing light?
This answer to How does the Starlink satellite shine? begins with
Starlink (and other satellites) ...
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Guidance and control inputs in autonomous satellites
I would like to know which are the standard navigation data available on a small satellite (in LEO). In particular, I'm trying to understand which inputs I should consider for the Guidance&Control ...
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A hybrid micropropulsion system for CubeSats
I am curious about how much potential would a hybrid (electric & chemical) micropropulsion system have for CubeSats.
The chosen propellant is water due to its non toxic nature, cheap cost and high ...
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How will the LICIACube cubesat transmit DART impact images back to Earth? What kind of antenna and radio will it use?
MarCO
The Mars Cube Ones or MarCOs were 6U cubesats that were deployed in deep space during the InSight mission to observe it during a critical, dynamic period of its mission, in this case the N ...
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Has there ever been a deliberate "Find A Satellite" challenge? Actually, could there be?
Companies often offer rewards for finding security issues in their products or their own IT systems, and hackathons have a long history.
I'm just wondering if there has ever been a deliberate ...
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3U CubeSat components
as a project for school, we are designing a preliminary conceptual 3U CubeSat design. The mission is to launch in orbit at 1,000 km and Maintain orbit for 1 month. After orbit is maintained for 1 ...
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What is actually happening in this full mission rehearsal of CAPSTONE's propulsion hardware?
NASA Ames's feature CAPSTONE’s CubeSat Prepares for Lunar Flight says
CAPSTONE will use a hydrazine-fueled propulsion system during most of its three- to four- month journey to the Moon. This line of ...
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How will NASA's software for autonomous navigation in cis-lunar space be tested; what information is processed, what outputs evaluated?
note: it's been a year and a half and Capstone is scheduled to be launched soon, so perhaps there is more information available now?
NASA news item NASA Funds CubeSat Pathfinder Mission to Unique ...
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Cubesats in lunar orbit and beyond - how does communication work?
Somewhere I read that there are serious plans to send a cubesat into lunar orbit. A few years ago, the ISS was also offering a launch opportunity for such a mission. I guess that it was actually ...
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Why put both Orbex and Rocket Labs on adjacent launch pads in Scotland?
update 2: BBC's May 11, 2022 Scottish spaceport's prototype rocket unveiled
update 1: There's some recent and potentially helpful information in NASA Spaceflight September 4, 2019 UK Spaceport at ...
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Could an articulated permanent magnet work as a low-power cubesat magnetotorquer? Problems?
Conventional magnetotorquers for cubesats are electromagnets that produce torque in the Earth's magnetic field, and nearly all of the power they use just heats the copper through $\text{I}^2 \text{R}$ ...
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Solar sail for a 3U cubesat: do we have to buy one or can we design one?
We are working on a conceptual design for a 3U CubeSat with solar sail propulsion; we aren’t actually building one or buying one.
However we still need to make decisions like whether to build our own ...
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CubeSat's ConOps implementation as a FSM with thread management [closed]
Can anyone shed light on this for me: How would you implement a Concept of Operations of a CubeSat as a Finite State Machine that manages each thread's priority?
Thank you !
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help understanding this complicated structure that will deploy HySIS
This ISRO page for the HysYS spacecraft says:
HysIS, the primary satellite of PSLV-C43 mission, weighing about 380 kg, is an earth observation satellite configured around ISRO’s Mini Satellite-2 (...
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What is the average solar irradiation in low earth orbit?
I am trying to figure out how much power I can expect for a CubeSat in Low Earth Orbit. Is there some dataset or constant that describes the average rate of solar irradiation (per unit of area) in LEO?...
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How serious a problem can outgassing of satellites be?
As I was reading the Cubesat standard, one of requirements is low outgassing "to prevent contamination of other spacecraft". It also gives a link to a NASA-approved list of low outgassing ...
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Why put SunRISE in the graveyard? Why will it "fly slightly above geosynchronous orbit"?
The blots.nasa.gov article NASA’s SunRISE Mission Studying Solar Particle Storms Moves Toward Launch says that the upcoming
SunRISE mission — short for the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment — ...
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Has a cubesat ever caused a problem for another spacecraft? Examples? Close calls?
Cubesats can pose some unique challenges; they are small and so potentially a little harder to track, have larger area/mass so more subject to forces that can change their trajectories, are often less ...
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Are LHCP L-Band antennas for Cubesats available?
I am designing a cubesat to carry out GNSS reflectometry or GNSS-R. To collect the earth reflected signals, I need a nadir pointing array of patch antennas, with Left Hand Circular Polarisation (LHCP) ...
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Do deployments of multiple cubesats generally obey proposed guidelines such as 20 seconds or more between deployments at 5 m/s or faster?
This answer to What can be done in future mass-cubesat deploys to make them “less irksome” to orbital space debris experts? links to Space Traffic Safety: A New Self-Governance Approach for the ...
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How do I calculate what antenna I need for my cubesat?
If I want to make a communication satellite, like MarCO, what formulas do I need to calculate the perfect antenna? Is there a difference between the X-Band and the classic UHF? If the cubesat is ...
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What is a good SNR value for a chipsat in LEO using bpsk?
My team and I are working on a chipsat and we are planning on launching it to LEO, we've also planned using bpsk.
However our use case is a bit different, all we need once it is in LEO is a ...
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How does a 22 dBi X-band "patch" antenna get so much gain and how well behaved is its high-gain radiation pattern?
@NgPh's answer to How will the LICIACube cubesat transmit DART impact images back to Earth? What kind of antenna and radio will it use? quotes LICIACube on DART mission: an asteroid impact captured by ...
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How well does wood thermally perform in space applications?
Wondering if there are any studies about using wood as a material for insulation in spacecraft? My specific question is does anyone have any experience with it working as an insulator? I remember a ...
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How can the two MarCO cubesats remain reliably close to InSight during their six month trip to Mars?
According to the NASA JPL web page Mars Cube One (MarCO) Mission Overview and the YouTube video MarCO: First Interplanetary CubeSat Mission linked there, after the Centaur upper stage deploys InSight, ...
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There are only a few suppliers of optical terminals: what is the reason?
I am conducting research into optical free space communication and small/nano satellites in LEO. I have found only a few companies which supply lasercom (laser communication) terminals (transmitter/...
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Number of satellites needed for global 4-fold coverage as a function of altitude?
I want to estimate how many satellites (and how many number of planes) are needed for achieving a 4-fold global coverage on earth (global coverage with at least 4 satellites in view in each location). ...
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Antenna for receivers
I am designing a CubeSat 6U in which I am using Software Defined Radio with SIGINT capability as my payload. The payload has 3 reception ports and 2 transmission ports and hence transceiver or ...
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How will NEA Scout control its attitude during deep space flight & keep its camera steady without vibrations or damage to its 85 m² solar sail?
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy's Fly Me to the Moon and Then to a Near-Earth Asteroid describes Near Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout, or just Scout) a 6U cubesat that will be deployed from Artemis ...
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Is the prompt relay of landing telemetry by the MarCo cubesats to Earth really a "first"?
The MarCo cubesats travelled from Earth to Mars alongside InSight and relayed signals from InSight (UHF) to Earth (X-band) during it's descent and landing on the surface of Mars.
The NPR podcast and ...
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How will JAXA's space elevator-testing cubesat experiment work?
The Infobae article Japón inicia hoy el ambicioso proyecto de construir un ascensor espacial which translated from Spanish into English by Google says
Japan begins today the ambitious project to ...
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Rocket to launch 8 cubesat to LEO at an equidistant distance
I am working on a project, which consists of the launch of 8 cubesat 1U to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and I started working on the launch part, the idea of the project is to be as cheap as possible, the ...
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Has Demonstrator-1 2021-006BX demonstrated a hydrogen-oxygen combustion engine fueled by electrolysis yet?
NASA's NASA CubeSat to Demonstrate Water-Fueled Moves in Space says:
A NASA CubeSat will launch into low-Earth orbit to demonstrate a new type of propulsion system. Carrying a pint of liquid water as ...
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How do cubesat owners first find out their cubesat's initial trajectory? How do they point antennas at it before official TLEs start to appear?
When cubesats are first deployed it can sometimes take several days before they start appearing in official TLE distributions, and even then if many were deployed it may take a lot more work to decide ...
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Cubesat half duplex communication stack
My understanding is that in half duplex transceivers, you are only able to either transmit or receive. In Cubesats using half duplex comms, which part of their communications stack is performing the ...
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Could a satellite use a Miniature Atomic Clock (MAC) to provide GPS services?
I've been investigating GPS satellites and I got curious about onboard atomic clocks. I found this following paper on the concept of a CubeSat GPS constellation using Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks, and ...
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Could the Electron launch a cubesat to Mars
Could the Electron in combination with it's kickstage deliver any meaningful mass to Mars, ie; a 2kg cubesat or is it unable to reach the required velocities even with no payload. Rocketlab are ...
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Advantages/disadvantages of wood for surface of cubesat?
Generally aluminum and kapton are the exterior surfaces of a cubesat. A Finnish/ESA cubesat, the WISA/Woodsat was launched that has plywood panels. It has protection against offgassing and very low ...
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Cubesat surface material
In wikipedia I read that the structure of the cubesat are made of aluminum alloys of 7075, 6061, 5005, and 5052. Is this the surface layer of the satellite or it is necessary to cover it with kapton ...
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Are there cubesat fan clubs? Does anybody besides their owners pay attention to them, look for or listen for them via radio?
I know the title sounds harsh, but I think it's a valid question. Public outreach and education/inspiration of the next generation has always been a part of spaceflight, and cubesats seemed to be one ...
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Could a single CubeSat provide location services on another celestial body such as Mars? Could a constellation do it?
From my understanding, by having two satellites emit a signal simultaneously (carrying atomic clocks to achieve it), a ground device could measure the difference in times of arrival to determine its ...
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