Improved nano-satellite technology makes space accessible

The big news in satellites today is small. With cellphone-size electronics in place, minisatellites called nano-satellites or CubeSats are instrumental in a new space revolution.

Today there are about 1,100 active satellites and 2,600 inactive satellites in orbit out of the 8,000 or so successful launches that made it into space. In addition, 20,000 pieces of spent rockets and space junk 4 inches or larger generated by collisions still orbit Earth.

The first satellites were small but had limited capability due to the relatively primitive electronic sophistication at the time. Sputnik, launched in October 1957, was a simple 2-foot-diameter sphere.

The Hubble telescope is the size of a school bus, and there are bigger satellites. The International Space Station, for example, is the length of a football field and end zones, but it was assembled in space rather than deployed as a single piece.

CubeSats have standard dimensions of 4 by 4 by 4 inches, or 1U. They come in versions that measure 1U, 2Us, 3Us or 6Us on a side, and typically weigh less than 3 pounds per U.

The advantages of CubeSats are many. Foremost is the cost: A typical satellite today costs $50 million compared with $100,000 for a 1U CubeSat.

CubeSats also reduce the cost of deployment because they can ride in the excess capacity of a launch vehicle, piggyback on the launcher as additional cargo or ease cargo changes on short notice.

They can use off-the-shelf electronic components, which lowers costs and allows them to attain low-Earth orbit where their lifetimes might be only a few day or weeks. They burn up quickly in the atmosphere with no residue.

The development of CubeSats began in 1999 at California Polytechnic State and Stanford universities as a way to facilitate space access for university students.

Aerospace engineering professors Jordi Puig-Suari and Bob Twiggs at Stanford laid out the standards for the design specifications and coined the term “CubeSat” to denote nano-satellites that adhere to those standards. Since then hundreds of organizations worldwide have adopted the standard, not only universities and educational institutions, but also private firms and government organizations.

The primary goal of the CubeSat program is to provide easy access to space. CubeSats now have the same capabilities as the big satellites except they are smaller, cheaper and faster to develop. Cheaper satellites will allow more people and more studies to learn about our planet.

To date, more than 100 CubeSats are used to monitor deforestation, disaster areas, space weather and Earth’s thermosphere, and to provide global high-resolution imagery. CubeSats can monitor atmospheric characteristics, gather data about the ozone layer and help with data gaps from huge devices and equipment.

The same technology that allows smartphones to contain a camera, tunes, photos, contacts and whatever else is the next innovation in space.

CubeSats will soon fly out of Earth’s orbit on their way to Mars and beyond. NASA’s two small Mars Cube One, or MarCO, CubeSats will fly past Mars in 2018 just as NASA’s next Mars lander, InSight, descends to land on the surface.

In 21st-century space exploration, small satellites are big.