CubeSat 101

Tyler is up again following lunch to introduce the audience to CubeSats and says he'll offer a brief history, a subsystems description and information about recent launches.

The CubeSat is the result of the work of Professor Bob Twiggs and Dr. Jordi Puig-Suari, who set out to design an interface and launch system around which individual satellites can be built.

Holding up a CubeSat displaying an image of a Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD, he explains how the standards satellite cube fits into the P-POD for the trip to space. These "secondary payloads" are sent up with more expensive satellites. NASA realizes the potential of these pico-satellites and has its own program.

Since 2003, several launches have occurred - from the Eurockot to the SSETI Express to the two DNEPR rocket launches (converted Russian ICBMs), to GeneSat to a launch just last month from India that sent a record number of cubes to space.

As Tyler emphasizes, these cubes are increasingly used for very serious research.

The cube use solar panels to collect the sun's energy and use batteries to store it. Batteries have short life spans. Command and data handling provide the "brains of the cube." It gathers data, stores it, and is typcially computer controlled.

Communications radios send the radio to a ground station, which in the case of KySat, will be in Morehead State University. More on that later.

Payloads have imaging, scientific, educational, data transfer and information missions. While originally, there was a lot of concern over the scope of missions, now it's widely understood that cubes can have a very wide range of missions.

For example, he says the Delfi C-3 will do thin film solar cell experiments on behalf of Dutch institutions. That project has taken CubeSat engineering to a new level. Because it has no batteries, the Delfi cube is in continuous operation. Its designers have also provided a way for the public to collect data from the cube. The deployable solar panels on four faces of the cube are a terrific engineering accomplishment.

He discusses the SEEDS, COMPASS-1, Cute-1.7 and APD II cubes.

About 40 universities in 13 countries are making CubeSats.

In response to a question, he says that a handheld antenna and radio will enable Kentucky students to interpret the Morse dots and dashes from the satellite. It will be one way for Kentucky elementary students to participate.

Wayne