Samsung Researchers Propose 4,600 Micro-Satellite Space Network 75
Bismillah writes: Samsung Electronics has proposed a network consisting of 4,600 micro-satellites that could act as backhaul for terrestrial cellular networks and take low-cost internet access worldwide. They project that by 2028, cellular and Wi-Fi traffic will exceed 1 zettabyte/month, and their goal is to design a system with equivalent capacity (PDF). "With the satellite-based backhaul, cellular and wi-fi deployments become practical in remote regions of the earth where there is no wired Internet infrastructure." The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Re:Lowcost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better question - who is gonna clean up all that space junk once the satellites die, or track it all while it's active? That's a lot of pieces that can potentially puncture a rocket, satellite, or crew capsule on it's way up, and we've got a lot of hazardous crap up there as it is.
Re:Lowcost? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even better question - who is gonna clean up all that space junk once the satellites die, or track it all while it's active? That's a lot of pieces that can potentially puncture a rocket, satellite, or crew capsule on it's way up, and we've got a lot of hazardous crap up there as it is.
This concern cannot be heard over the thunderous roar of Capitalism.
Neither can common sense.
Don't worry though. The irony will hit humanity like a fucking brick to the face once we find we have the technology to get off this rock, and yet cannot figure out a way to safely navigate through the cesspool of debris we've put in orbit.
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Those Asian and European mariners didn't expect to bring their entire continents with them when they found new land. Just some settlers.
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If the EM drive does turn out to be a usable reactionless thruster then an automated debris cleaning satellite is very possible.
It could rendezvous with debris, close in on it as slowly as needed, and snag it with a magnetic front plate or something else. When enough debris is collected it enters a deorbit or moon collision trajectory, releases the stored debris, then burns itself back up to a stable orbit to target more debris.
Give the thing a grapple arm and it could double as a service transport to grab
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Since 1993, all satellites are equipped with an "end of life" plan where they use up their final burst of fuel to deorbit and burn up, or are sent further out into space. Here's one link: http://space.io9.com/where-do-... [io9.com]
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Most microsats are lower then LEO. But for this to work they will have to be in LEO.
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And the impact on radio astronomy would be considerable as well.
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Uh, the Earth's atomosphere?
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That is precisely what the paper linked in the article is about. They identify about 50 GHz of bandwidth (separately for uplink, downlink and interlink) at frequencies between 10 and 250 GHz. At those frequencies beams can easily be kept pretty narrow, so multiple beams will not interfere.
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Tracking a few thousand active satellites is trivial, especially as they are radio transmitters and are probably telling their base stations where they are pretty often to allow groundstations to aim their beams.
Since they are in LEO they will not last long once they are out of use. Even if they all failed catastrophically it would be a problem for a few years at most.
Micro-satellites are for tiny space cows. (Score:1)
You are all tiny space cows. In space, nobody can hear you moo. ""! ""! "" tiny space cows ""! "" say the tiny space cows. YOU TINY SPACE COWS!!
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tiny space cows
That's kind of adorable.
So close and yet so far (Score:3)
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Tells us more about your preferences than anything else. It's an avenue we shouldn't explore, and now I'll go back and watch zit videos on YouTube.
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More junk? (Score:5, Interesting)
I watched the Horizon programme [bbc.co.uk] about space junk the other week - it was good - and one of the points raised in it was concern about cubesats not having any movement capability and being cheap and considered "disposable" and thus much more likely to become part of the junk problem that other, expensive, satellites.
4600 micro sats sounds to me like even more junk waiting to happen. Keep it up and we'll not be able to have any nice things in orbit soon.
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I suppose a lot depends on their orbit and at what point it decays.
If that is 4600 objects in a very stable high orbit, then we're looking at a long term problem. If it is in LEO and has been deployed to have its orbit decay by the end of the expected service life of the object, that is a problem that takes care of itself after a certain amount of time.
Looks like from the article they are going to be in LEO, which makes sense based on the application.
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And most microsats are in an orbit that will last only a few weeks. (below LEO)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This should be simple to add even to a cubesat (having designed one myself), might require at most an additional U, there seems to be an interesting business / social opportunity to design a cheap one-shot module (maybe 1/4 U form factor) to deploy.
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4600 micro sats sounds to me like even more junk waiting to happen. Keep it up and we'll not be able to have any nice things in orbit soon.
TFA: "low earth orbit â" in a range between 160km and 2000km in altitude." At least the lower end of that range (up to 400 km) shouldn't be a problem. Air drag will slow down the sats until they burn up in the upper atmosphere.
Yeah, right ... (Score:2, Insightful)
It could, but it won't.
There's far too much corporate interest in making sure we pay through the nose for cellular and internet access.
They're not going to allow low-cost anything. They might lower their costs, and increase their profits. But they will actively resist ever lowering our costs.
Low cost? Affordable? That sounds like communism right there, there's shareholder value and executive bonuses t
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Speak for the US of A, friend. Most other civilized countries (and many of the not-so-civilized) have really cheap, high-speed Internet access, both on mobiles and fixed lines.
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Well, if you're right, why don't you (and your rich investors) do it for half the price? Still get rich as hell, and you're doing us all a favor at the same time. I like win-wins.
See how I turned your communism around into good old American can-do.. um, do-ness?
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Space junk... (Score:2)
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Sounds like a plan (Score:1)
"I recommend a full planetary frontal assault with 4,600 assault laser micro-satellites!"
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are we there yet? (Score:1)
can anyone indicate that we're dealing with this shit, yet?
it's as important as the environment and climate, files under both, really...
aside from the obvious solution of turning them all into confetti deliberately, to make an umbrella, should we fail to fix the warming problem sensibly...
is there anything practical being done, to limit the amount of crap we send up?
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Stuff in LEO is slowed by atmospheric drag. Unless actively boosted, its orbit will decay and it will re-enter.
As for stuff above/beyond LEO, space is *REALLY* fucking big. What looks like a solid band of junk on a computer screen is in reality an incredibly sparse field with gaps where there's nothing within miles.
Don't get me wrong, we need to avoid making too big of a mess, but compact satellites with predictable orbits and lifetimes are not the threat. Satellites that self-destruct or are destroyed by o
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Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
If Earth Not a Globe, how do they stay up? (Score:1)
How does a satellite stay up if the Earth is really flat?
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/za/za00.htm
The above was written in the late 1800s so does not perform any experiments regarding satellites. It is well worth looking into though; one can see things across the water that should be "below the horizon" -- it is important to note that this observation disproves the current globe theory! (It might be a much larger globe, perhaps, but it is not a 25,000 mile around globe.)
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I use software that predicts their sightings. The software even accurately predicts when the satellite will turn dark due to the sun setting on it.
1. So if the earth is flat why do we not observe the ISS traveling East to West just as freq
This? Again? Not going to work... (Score:3)
The major problem is clearly stated in the article:
The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Where we could build the satellites, what doesn't exist is the wireless spectrum. This is basically going to suffer the same fate as Light Squared did when they attempted to get some spectrum reassigned for high power terrestrial use. All of this about spectrum space.. Well, most of it is.
This basically amounts to putting up 5K cell towers sans the towers using satellites. The Cellular spectrum is very crowded and expensive to obtain in the industrialized world. It's not going to happen, it's way too expensive and will be very difficult to internationally manage the legal aspects of such a system.
planned failure in... (Score:4, Informative)
Every business plan based on making "remote regions" pay has failed. "Remote" regions that have the money have already installed infrastructure that will make this expensive and everyone else is too poor to make it worthwhile. Either a government steps in like the USG did for Iridium or this will disappear in short order.
Samsung Terminators need a Skynet (Score:1)
Samsung is a world leader in the insane killer robot business ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AKZC-5dFWQ ) and now has robotic Howitzer, ammo and fire control platforms ( http://www.samsungtechwin.com/... [samsungtechwin.com] ) ... having a network of satellites too. Now all you need is a malicious AI to troll up a war with North Korea and it's game over... or something like that.
From the paper (Score:3)
I took the time to skim the paper for the LEO detains that the Australian ITNews article skimmed over. The ITNews article was (sadly) a good summary - discussion of LEO satellites was limited to the altitude (160 to 2000 kilometers) and why LEO is better for signal strength than synchronous orbits. No mention at all about the inclination of the orbits (or even if polar orbits were considered). No consideration was given in the paper to existing uses of LEO (such as the Hubble Telescope or the ISS - but they'd probably be out-of-commission by the time anything remotely like this proposal was attempted.) No thought was given to what it would take to replenish the satellites in orbit (i.e.: how many launches per. year) or how small satellites would de-orbit at the end of their useful life or any consideration at all about satellites that had failed and needed to de-orbit.
A particular point I'd like to consider is that the authors didn't seem to give any consideration of the coverage the satellites would offer based on the inclination of the orbits. It appears that the authors assumed equatorial orbits - which would certainly exclude coverage of polar regions (including coverage of trans-arctic flights.) I'd be curious if any consideration was given of coverage north (or south) of 45 degrees - such as Canada, all of Scandinavia, most of Russia, and so on.
Math (Score:2)
Just chiming in on numbers. 1 zettabyte/month is:
440kbps unicast 24/7 for all humans
all that spectrum... (Score:2)
...which will go to some well funded organization to realize this dream, then when the inevitable happens and the project dies, they hang on to that valuable spectrum...
Going to get crowded (Score:2)
With 4,600 here and Airbus sending up 900 [theguardian.com].