NASA To Develop Small Satellites

coondoggie brings news that NASA has announced it will team with Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corp. to produce small satellites, called 'nanosats,' weighing between 11 and 110 pounds. The satellites will work together in 'constellations' and facilitate networking in space. According to NASA's press release, it will 'develop a fifth generation telecommunications and networking system for Internet protocol-based and related services.' We've discussed miniature satellites in the past.

Nothing new Hams been doing for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Amateur radio has been doing this for years. They call them microsats and get cheap flight aboard rockets when they get used as ballast.

Re:Mass appeal

[GileadGreene]

Hate to break it to you, but so-called "picosats" [nasa.gov] have already been launched. They are indeed in the 1kg mass range. You're also right that "femtosats" are on the cards. See here [sstl.co.uk] for one of the more popular mass classification schemes. I'm eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first "yocto [wikipedia.org]sat"...

Re:Mass appeal

[timmarhy]

" When the satellites are deployed, their weight will be zero."

epic fail. they still weigh 100 pounds on earth and it's getting INTO space where they will weigh nothing that's the expensive part.

Nanosats aren't new

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm launching one in June: http://cusat.cornell.edu/

Re:Mass appeal

[evanbd]

And as soon as the launcher starts to move, the weight is no longer all that meaningful. Everyone in the industry uses metric -- though you'll still see rough numbers quoted in Imperial units, mostly for marketing though. Basically any time 1kg = 2 lb and g = 10m/s^2 aren't accurate enough, people use metric. OP is right, /. should be using metric here.

Re:Mars

[imemyself]

I am not a rocket scientist but I think there would be some problems with using sats orbiting the moon for GPS type stuff. My understanding is that lunar orbits are not stable long term because of the gravitational effects of the earth and sun.

had to check myself

[WindBourne]

Apparently the trick is not too close and not too far. Low orbits bring down the sat due to grav differences. [nasa.gov]
OTH, if you are too high or orbit is wrong, then earth plays with it as well. [physorg.com]

Thanx for pointing that out. I like to learn.

Re:Great, "Nano". Bah! Nano my

[necro81]

SI prefixes have been applied to satellites [wikipedia.org] for a while now. They are used to differentiate satellites based on weight. Instead of three orders-of-magnitude per prefix (e.g., micro -> nano = 10^-3), they are one order-of-magnitude. In general, the classification has been broken like so:

minisatellite: 100 - 1000 kg
micro-: 10 - 100 kg
nano-: 1 - 10 kg
pico-: 100 g - 1 kg

Theoretically, these satellites come down by orders of magnitude in cost, too. An example of a Picosat would be the CubeSat [cubesat.org] program that a number of colleges have tinkered with - a relatively inexpensive satellite 10 cm to a side that could be launched with a few dozen other cubesats, thus amortizing the launch cost over many participants.