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.

Great,

[Ethanol-fueled]

Just what we need, more ofthis [space.com].

I guess it would be more difficult to shoot down a self-healing mesh of small satellites(as opposed to shooting down one big one [cnn.net]).

Re:Mass appeal

[Hojima]

A satellite isn't a unit a unit of measurement, so you don't really have to worry about that. They'll just say, "nanosats getting smaller" as a headline. Also, very very doubtful that satellites get to be in grams. Getting something that light into stable orbit is like trying to throw a penny through a field goal from 30 yards away. That, and getting 1kg objects into space with existing rail guns might be just as easy as getting lighter objects, so it wouldn't make sense.

Mars

[WindBourne]

Mars needs a communication network that will also handle GPS. Since there is little atmosphere, and atomic clock is now chip size, I have been thinking that it would be useful to see the same thing employed around the moon, and then deployed later to mars. Ideally, each sat will have enough size and power left over to handle an extra device, so that each sat or a group of sats might have something unique.

Re:Mass appeal

[doctor_nation]

Yeah, the satellite size ranges are really messed up. Consider that a normal satellite weighs on the order of a metric ton or several tons (1000's of kgs). For some reason, the names only scale as a factor of 10, not 1000, so micro-sats are around 100 kg, nano-sats around 10 kg, and picosats around 1 kg. There are actually femto-sats (if I recall correctly), that are little more than a small circuit board with a few chips on it. Those are 100's of grams. There's also mini-sats somewhere between full satellites and micro-sats, but I don't know where they're supposed to fit in.

Re:Mass appeal

[Raptoer]

They will still weigh quite a bit when in orbit.

But the force of gravity pulling down will be countered by the force of it spinning around the earth. Astronauts are in free fall, not in 0g.

Re:HAM radio operators....

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! We've had birds up there since the 60's. Heck, Amsat pioneered small satellites. It's amazing it took them this long to catch on.

Re:Great,

[Anonymous Coward]

If we _doubled_ the number of manmade objects in orbit right now, it'll still only make up about 15% of the stuff up there. What the hell do you care?