Research Space: ISS poised to launch open-source satellites

Research Space: ISS poised to launch open-source satellites

2013/08/09

Want to do your own space experiment? From next week, you will be able to run science projects on the world’s first open-source satellites. And it won’t break the bank.

ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X were launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 August aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle (which is also carrying fresh food, supplies and a talking humanoid robot).

Known as CubeSats, each mini satellite packs an array of devices – including cameras, spectrometers and a Geiger counter – into a cube just 10 centimetres to a side.

The cargo ship carrying the CubeSats should arrive at the ISS on 9 August, and the satellites will then be deployed using a robotic-arm technique tested last year. The method can put several small satellites into orbit around Earth, eliminating the need for dedicated launch vehicles and making citizen-science missions like ArduSat more affordable.

“No one has given people access to satellites in the same way that we’re doing with ArduSat,” says Chris Wake of NanoSatisfi, the San Francisco company that builds and operates the satellites.

The maiden launch was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, with backers buying some of the satellites’ time slots to run experiments. If there are enough extra time slots, paying customers will also be able to program controls on the satellites and run experiments for three days for $125, or for a week for $250.

The satellites run Arduino, an open-source platform popular with hobbyists, which will let anyone write code for an app, game or research project that uses the on-board instruments. Projects that will run on the first two Ardusats are yet to be announced, but a list of ideas from the developers includes tracking meteorites and making a 3D model of Earth’s magnetosphere.

Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not on the Ardusat team, but her students design and build CubeSats for planetary science. “This definitely is helping open up space both to all people and all nations,” Seager says of the Ardusat launch.

The first two satellites will orbit for three to seven months before burning up as they fall to Earth. NanoSatisfi hopes to send fleets of them into space on future launches. “We’re focused on launching a number of these over the next few years,” says Wake. “Five years out, we’d love to see 100, 150 of these up in the air, reaching half a million students.”

Syndicated content: Lisa Grossman, New Scientist

(Image: NASA – These CubeSats were released last year outside the ISS’s Kibo laboratory using a Small Satellite Orbital Deployer attached to the Japanese module’s robotic arm)

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