Dec 18, 2018 05:30 AM
(Dec 17, 2018 06:57 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]. . . Payload was 13 little cubesats. Ten were part of NASA's Elana 19 package, consisting of small R&D satellites from universities and places like that, with the remaining three from the Aerospace Corporation and DARPA.
Radar has catalogued 15 objects in that orbit. The other two are probably parts of the rocket that carried and ejected the little satellites. [...] Jonathan McDowell identifies ten of the 13 cubesats here [...] One of them was actually built by K-12 students at a STEM charter school in northern Idaho. It's called the DaVinci Project. [...]
The burgeoning onslaught of all these mini-sats has to make one wonder initially about the space junk problem.
Do Small Satellites Make For More Space Junk?: . . . The Earth is already surrounded by space junk. Isn't launching 100-plus nanosatellites a bit like throwing crumbs on the living room floor? Luckily, many satellites are able to do something crumbs aren't. They clean themselves up. Small satellites launched into orbit 650 kilometers or less above the surface of the Earth soon fall back down toward Earth. They plunge through the Earth's atmosphere and, because they're small, they burn up before reaching the ground. In addition, few spacecraft orbit below 650 kilometers in altitude, so there's not as much for small satellites to hit. [...] Problems arise when people send smaller satellites into higher orbit....
The Space Junk Problem Is About to Get a Whole Lot Gnarlier: . . . Little orbiters—especially the smallest types, CubeSats and NanoSats—are within reach of research scientists, government agency experiments, smaller companies, and even individual humans. Take the private Breakthrough Starshot project, which eventually plans to send diminutive spacecraft to Alpha Centauri star system (really). It just launched six "Sprites": the world's smallest satellites, measuring 3.5 centimeters on a side.
All of those satellite operators are in charge of making sure what they sent up comes back down, in a timely way. Bigsat operators can just use the last of their fuel to plunge their darlings toward the ocean. But many smallsats, especially the smallest kinds, don’t have propulsion systems. To naturally “de-orbit” fast, they have to be in an orbit that naturally decays quickly—an ellipse in which atmospheric drag drags them back to Earth fast. Some smallsat operators are planning to put propulsion systems aboard. Great! But that poses another problem: explosions....
~