TechEdSat from San Jose State University
There have been some recent sightings of strange cube-shaped objects in earth’s orbit, but there’s no need to worry they’re not Borg cubes on a mission to assimilate the earths inhabitants. Rather, these are small experimental satellites designed by engineering students from San Jose State University. The TechEdSats were recently launched from the Kibo Laboratory aboard the International Space Station last Friday (October 5th, 2012) to ‘evaluate Space Plug and play Avionics’ as well as perform a communications experiment using the Iridium and Orbcomm SAT-phone network.
The satellites were sponsored in part by NASA’s Ames Research Center with additional help from AAC Microtec. The projects aims at giving engineering students the opportunity to experience a space-flight project from conception to decommission of the launched satellites. The Cube-SATs were designed using a Quake Global Q1000 Modem (Orbcomm) and a Global Q9602 Modem (Iridium) along with a Stensat radio beacon. The components contributed by AAC Microtec include the TechEdSat’s Main Power Distribution Board, RTU Lite on-board computer module for Plug-and-Play avionics and a 4X nanoRTU muti-chip module also for Plug-and-Play avionics. The micro-satellite also features a 2 meter band monopole antenna, 70cm band monopole antenna and a 1600MHz patch antenna which are housed inside of a Pumpkin Inc. 1U Skeletonized CubeSat housing powered by a Canon BP-930 Li-ion battery. While micro-satellites are nothing new they are the future and since most of these satellites cost around $30,000 US (way cheaper than their big brothers plus you can pack more of them in a rocket payload) we can certainly expect to see quite a bit more of them in the future.
Cabe