KickSat Sprites aboard CRS 3

[Bob Shaw]

I'm one of 104 owners of the tiny KickSat Sprite satellites due to be launched aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS 3 mission to the ISS in the next fortnight. My Sprite will, if all goes well, broadcast the name of my business in Morse Code (GPS) to the world, while the KickSat bus will display the full company name in laser-etched letters on the side. Arthur C Clarke would be proud, RAH prouder still!

I'll attempt, with a radio enthusiast friend, to receive the signal from the Sprite, but obviously that may not happen - but, we will try.

The whole project was funded via KickStarter, a crowdfunding website which allowed supporters to choose a variety of funding levels and rewards, including an actual orbital launch.

During the 1970s and early 1980s I pursued the goal of low-cost satellite development (via my 'By your Own Bootrap SATellite' or BOBSAT proposal and later through the NASA 'Getaway Special' program) and I have to say that having - at last - even a tiny satellite payload aboard a rocket is intensely gratifying. I'm very pleased that Zac Manchester (the guiding light of KickSat) finally developed the new paradigm of personal spaceflight to the point of flight. Even more importantly, he found a way to pay for the hardware, a point at which pre-Internet proposals tended to stall. Thanks, Zac!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KickSat

I'll try to pick up press and web coverage and post links to it in this thread; any contributions are welcome.

[Jimmy_C]

That's really cool. What kind of science can be done with a satellite that small? Can it be tracked by radar?  Stuff already done, but useful for school or college students perhaps. (How fast it's going by Doppler shift maybe? Perhaps details about the Earth's magnetic field, gravitational field, or atmosphere at that height? How digital circuits respond to radiation at that altitude? Just guessing.)

[dsobin]

So, please tell us the frequency and modulation of your transmission so we can all listen! I'm sure after launch it will be easy to find the orbital elements online.

[tait13]

https://github.com/zacinaction/kicksat/wiki/Radio-Info The KickSat wiki has all this info. It appears all the sprites are using the same frequency.

[Bob Shaw]

The initial KickSats are very much proof of concept test articles, which will hopefully prove that a swarm of femtosats can be effectively ejected from an already tiny 3u CubeSat. The subsequent possibilities are enormous!

Here are a few qualitative applications (feel free to comment):

* multi-point observation of transient events
* 3D observation of processes
* massively redundant data points in harsh environments

For specifics, consider magnetosphere research, synthetic aperture RADAR, and upper atmosphere dynamics.

The obvious limitations are power, data transmission rates and the physicality of instruments - but in the right place, femtosats offer many possibilities.

Future crowd-funded (etc) projects include a swarm mission to the Moon, and there are also serious discussions regarding CubeSat Mars missions and associated very safe boost stage technologies (eg PV water breakdown into H and O2 or small electric drives within the CubeSat size specification).

Go and Google!

[Bob Shaw]

That's really cool. What kind of science can be done with a satellite that small? Can it be tracked by radar?  Stuff already done, but useful for school or college students perhaps. (How fast it's going by Doppler shift maybe? Perhaps details about the Earth's magnetic field, gravitational field, or atmosphere at that height? How digital circuits respond to radiation at that altitude? Just guessing.)

RADAR is probably not a starter, I think, but the femtosats themselves can possibly talk to GPS satellites. See my other post!

[Lar]

Another Kickstarter thread, causing people to willingly give these companies free advertising on forums. Reported to mod.

1 ) this is a private citizen  (and NSF member in good standing)  who HAS A SATELLITE about to launch. Not kickstarter advertising, but rather, something quite momentous.

2 ) If you have an issue, report it, DO NOT POST.

3 ) If you report something, be nice. Don't be nasty, don't be snide, don't disparage others, just report the issue.

[Bob Shaw]

Gosh, that was a raw nerve that got touched there! I'm sorry if my post caused offence - I linked to the Kickstarter page because it was a crucial part of the story, and my role throughout has been merely that of a consumer rather than an originator. So, it was important to hear about it from the horse's mouth, so speak.

I hope everyone else found it interesting.

[zacinaction]

Hi Everyone,

I run the KickSat project (it's my PhD thesis). If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. If you're a Ham, I'd love to have you try to listen to KickSat and/or the Sprites. Check out our website for some background info: kicksat.net.

- Zac

[Chris Bergin]

Good man Zac, welcome to the site's forum.

Lots of news and not enough fingers, but I'll e-mail you later today and see if there's something we can put together for the news site. It's a cool idea and there's automatic interest in CRS-3.

[ArbitraryConstant]

synthetic aperture RADAR, and upper atmosphere dynamics.

That seems like a really interesting application. With computer technology we're getting really good at solving for complex problems using dispersed data points like this.

How long will they remain in orbit? Do you think this technology represents a debris problem if used on large scale?

[Bob Shaw]

The KickSat Sprites won't remain in orbit long - I understand that the KickSat carrier with it's cargo will be ejected before the circularisation burn, so will have a low perigee to start with. In addition, their surface area is large relative to their mass (not that they are very dense to start with) so they will 'feel' atmospheric drag very quickly. Finally, the Sprites won't be ejected from the KickSat immediately, so although the KickSat bus won't suffer the same rapid drag effects it will be in orbit for (I think) a fortnight, and will certainly feel something by then. This sounds like Zac's territory, though!

I'd imagine that future sprites will have more solar cell area (eg on both sides) and perhaps use supercapacitor power storage to allow a burst of electrical energy to fire up an instrument, transmitter or whatever. Even so, the design limitations are clear: the things are, by definition, tiny. One project for a Lunar femtosat mission envisages hundreds of - literally - printed spacecraft, with the circuitry and components on a very light foil base rather than KickSat's circuit-board so clearly things could get even lighter.

[Vultur]

I find the idea of these ultra-tiny satellites very intriguing. I wish I'd been involved in KickSat, but at the time I'd never even heard of Kickstarter (and was in college so couldn't have afforded one anyway)...

[Lar]

One project for a Lunar femtosat mission envisages hundreds of - literally - printed spacecraft, with the circuitry and components on a very light foil base rather than KickSat's circuit-board so clearly things could get even lighter.

I supported that one but I don't think it got past the goal to get funded...

[Bob Shaw]

The Lunar project failed in it's original attempt to raise money, but was then offered adequate funding elsewhere (as I understand it).

I *do* hope to be aboard, at least in terms of a fraction of the payload!

Hmmm... ...LEO, the Moon... ...anybody going to Mars?

[Sohl]

Good luck Bob and Zac!

[Prober]

Hi Everyone,

I run the KickSat project (it's my PhD thesis). If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. If you're a Ham, I'd love to have you try to listen to KickSat and/or the Sprites. Check out our website for some background info: kicksat.net.

- Zac

congrats on your kickstarter and the project.

Get in your head question:  What Radiation-hardening techniques did you use? What was your thinking with this project?

[Bob Shaw]

There's an interview with Zac on NASA Edge:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/46645286

He's on at 1:08:35 or so.

Interestingly, he says that the Sprites will last "from two days to a week" in orbit. The KickSat Bus has been described as staying up for less than ninety days.

I met a bunch of old friends in the space game over the Easter weekend at the Eastercon SF Convention in Glasgow - and I delighted in pointing out to them that Sputnik could broadcast just one letter, but my satellite was able to send three: G P S. Oh, and in deference to a *lot* of history, my Sprite has now been officially named 'BOBSat' after my original 1970s By your Own Bootstrap Satellite proposal. And yes, there were many pints of real ale raised to toast the wee beastie!

[Prober]

Any more to this story?

[Vultur]

Any more to this story?

According to this the Sprites will be released May 4th

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space/posts/816584

The Lunar project failed in it's original attempt to raise money, but was then offered adequate funding elsewhere (as I understand it).

I *do* hope to be aboard, at least in terms of a fraction of the payload!

This is the Pocket Spacecraft project http://pocketspacecraft.com/

I saw that, but wasn't sure how "real" / likely to happen it was. So the mission probably will happen then?

[Prober]

bump this info from another thread...

Bad news about Kicksat.  The timer for the Sprite deployment reset on 30th April, apparently due to a cosmic ray hit.  This means that that deployment is postponed from tomorrow to May 16th.  The current atmospheric decay estimate for the satellite is May 14th.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space/posts

[Bob Shaw]

Latest news on KickSat at 15:33 BST today (and, most importantly, *my* satellite) - and it's not entirely good: the clock has been reset aboard the KickSat carrier and the whole shebang *may* re-enter before the Sprites are ejected. Poo!

"Project Update #72: KickSat's Current Status
Posted by Zachary Manchester

Hi Everyone,

First off, I'd like to sincerely thank all of you for your support over the past two years. KickSat has been a success up to this point because of you.

As those who've been keeping up with the telemetry data coming in from KickSat on our mailing list may have noticed, the packets we've been receiving have changed in the last couple of days. This was due to a hard reset of the "watchdog" microcontroller on KickSat - the sort of "reptile brain" of the satellite that manages turning on and off the rest of the subsystems and keeps the master clock. It appears the reset happened some time in the morning of Wednesday, April 30th. The reset doesn't seem to be the result of power issues (the watchdog should run until the batteries reach 5.5 volts, and they've been holding steady around 6.5 volts). Instead, it seems the likely culprit was radiation.

One consequence of the watchdog reset on KickSat is that the spacecraft's master clock was reset, thus also setting the deployment countdown for KickSat back to 16 days. That would put the deployment some time in the morning of May 16th. Unfortunately, it looks like KickSat will most likely reenter and burn up before the 16th. We've spent the last couple of days here at Cornell trying to think of every possible contingency, but it seems there aren't very many options right now. KickSat's uplink radio, which we could use to command the deployment, can't turn on unless the batteries reach 8 volts, and it doesn't look like they'll reach that level in time.

While the situation looks a little bleak, there is still some hope that the batteries may recharge sufficiently to command the satellite. There is also a small chance that KickSat could remain in orbit until the 16th, at which point the timer would set off the deployment as originally planned. We'll continue tracking KickSat over the next few days with the help of the ham community, so that we can keep track of its battery voltage and the Sprite deployment status. I'll post updates here, as usual, but you can also see the latest data as it comes in on our mailing list.

Thank you again for your support. I promise that this won't be the end of the KickSat project.

- Zac"

[Elmar Moelzer]

Man, this sucks! Radiation is a bitch!
I hope that they can get it to work! Best of luck!

[mlindner]

Man, this sucks! Radiation is a bitch!
I hope that they can get it to work! Best of luck!

Happens on cubesats all the time. We had a watchdog timer to reset the spacecraft, a watchdog timer to reset the watchdog timer and a backup processor inside the radio that had rudimentary control of the spacecraft power bus. We regularly saw the spacecraft reset from radiation hits, just a fact of life of cubesats. You need to design the system with constant resets in mind.

Really unfortunate about this though.

[Bob Shaw]

Mmmm. It does seem to be an unfortunate design choice. I'm reminded of the Soviet spacecraft of the 1960s, and the way that so many were nobbled by timers. In fact, not just the 1960s, now that I think about it. And not just the Soviets...

Timers for 'Help! I can't communicate!' backup seem perfectly sensible, and could provide a straightforward form of insurance in a situation where you're already dealing with an unhappy spacecraft, but an unprogramable timer which is fully responsible for mission success and a spacecraft design which has rendered said timer unprogramable does seem like a design flaw.

I was recently able to have a good look at (and handle) ClydeSpace CubeSat components (battery packs and solar panels) and was *very* impressed with their general quality and detailed design; I hope to speak to them again, and will ask about CubeSat design methodology when I do. Zac Manchester's KickSat was, however, built at a small fraction of the cost of a ClydeSpace spacecraft, and the available level of funding may well have been reflected in a series of necessary compromises...

Here are some links:

http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/

http://www.clyde-space.com

[Prober]

Man, this sucks! Radiation is a bitch!
I hope that they can get it to work! Best of luck!

that's why I asked about Radiation.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=34414.msg1182300#msg1182300

[Bob Shaw]

Man, this sucks! Radiation is a bitch!
I hope that they can get it to work! Best of luck!

that's why I asked about Radiation.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=34414.msg1182300#msg1182300

Ah, it was *your* fault, was it...

[mlindner]

Man, this sucks! Radiation is a bitch!
I hope that they can get it to work! Best of luck!

that's why I asked about Radiation.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=34414.msg1182300#msg1182300

Radiation hardening is not needed on cubesats, nor should it be used. It's out of the scope of their design IMO. There is an interplanetary cubesat coming, that may be the first cubesat that may need radiation hardening.

Given that, there is part selection you can do among COTS things that allows for natural radiation hardening. Like not using SD Cards on orbit (these failed constantly for us) and using FRAM based processors.

Zac Manchester's KickSat was, however, built at a small fraction of the cost of a ClydeSpace spacecraft, and the available level of funding may well have been reflected in a series of necessary compromises...

Building them with unpaid undergrad and graduate students worked for us. (I was one of them. Was paid during the summer though.) I seem to remember our 3U cubesat was somewhere around $45k in parts including engineering units and development units (not counting labor).

[Bob Shaw]

I'd heard of FRAM memory, but didn't know it was used in microprocessors themselves - it's interesting to also note the longevity of PowerPC CPUs in space applications, long after Apple gave up on them!

[CuddlyRocket]

Radiation hardening is not needed on cubesats, nor should it be used. It's out of the scope of their design IMO. There is an interplanetary cubesat coming, that may be the first cubesat that may need radiation hardening.

Given that, there is part selection you can do among COTS things that allows for natural radiation hardening. Like not using SD Cards on orbit (these failed constantly for us) and using FRAM based processors.

The other alternative - like SpaceX uses on Dragon - is redundancy including enabling resetting; though that brings its own obvious problems in such small satellites.

[Bob Shaw]

The way I read it, the ability to do a reset is there, but the battery power required to get the signal isn't.

[Llian Rhydderch]

Radiation hardening is not needed on cubesats, nor should it be used. It's out of the scope of their design IMO. There is an interplanetary cubesat coming, that may be the first cubesat that may need radiation hardening.

Given that, there is part selection you can do among COTS things that allows for natural radiation hardening. Like not using SD Cards on orbit (these failed constantly for us) and using FRAM based processors.

The other alternative - like SpaceX uses on Dragon - is redundancy including enabling resetting; though that brings its own obvious problems in such small satellites.

Correct.  A fault-tolerant architecture can be used rather than the rad-hardened processors that have been typically used.

With continuous improvement in the level of integration in integrated circuits, and dramatically-lowered costs year-on-year for many decades now (see Moore's Law), there is no inherent reason the electronic hardware won't be at a size, and sufficiently integrated for the multiprocessor Byzantine fault-tolerance scheme that SpaceX uses (both on Falcon rockets and on Dragon capsules) to be available in cubesat form-factors and costs in the next decade.

And if you ask, what would drive a chip maker or system-integrator make such a system, I have two answers.  Both provide potential drivers for movement in this direction:

 * with the architecture SpaceX has been using now flight-tested, shown to be reliable, and further data on in-space performance coming in rapidly, it could be that SpaceX and other companies that could use this capability in space applications may help drive the forward progress on the technology.

 * the demand might come from the consumer market.  While fault-tolerant high-availability systems are generally available only in the higher-end "enterprise class" of computing systems (servers, data storage controllers, etc.), at many times the price, the consumer market is large enough to drive change itself.  We could see a future, and possibly a near future, where consumer demand for better quality PCs/tablet/smartphones (fewer resets, need to reboot in the middle of important use of the device, etc.) may incent chip makers to package hardware in more-capable and more highly integrated chips/memory/storage specifically aimed at a consumer fault-tolerant market.  If this happens, expect rapid adoption of the same tech in cubesats, and migration into avionics architectures like SpaceX is using, and other launch providers are certainly free to emulate once market forces take over for the top-down government driven requirements of previous space systems.

[gwiz]

Kicksat has apparently decayed, two days before the Sprites were to be released.

[mlindner]

Kicksat has apparently decayed, two days before the Sprites were to be released.

That's too bad. Hopefully they can do a second one so the funders can have a second shot at their pico-sats. Much of the development cost is already paid for so they just need to re-buy components (along with possibly some minor code/hardware changes to remove this fault mechanism).

[Bob Shaw]

Oh, poo.

KickSat II please, Zac!

[Elmar Moelzer]

Sorry to see the hard work of so many people go down because of this
Hope there will be another try, Zac!

[mlindner]

KickSat is a good example of innovation through cubesats though. Innovate fast, fail fast, innovate again. The mechanism to deploy the kicksats is honestly rather innovative and ingenious. It's not something that could be tried and depended on first time for a larger mission. I hope to see this trend continue and the ideas of cubesats get more adoption through to microsats.

[Llian Rhydderch]

KickSat is a good example of innovation through cubesats though. Innovate fast, fail fast, innovate again. The mechanism to deploy the kicksats is honestly rather innovative and ingenious. It's not something that could be tried and depended on first time for a larger mission. I hope to see this trend continue and the ideas of cubesats get more adoption through to microsats.

Indeed, mlindner, "Innovate fast, fail fast, innovate again." 

I suspect this team, and what re-assembles after the post-mortem review is complete, will learn some good lessons in electronic hardware and embedded software architecture, and that they'll come back with an even better CubeSat offering of more, and more capable, Sprite femtosats on the next go 'round.

[Bob Shaw]

Here's Zac Manchester's message to the KickSat backers:

" Project Update #73: KickSat Has Reentered
Posted by Zachary Manchester

Hi Everyone,

KickSat reentered the atmosphere and burned up last night some time around 9:30 PM EDT (01:30 UTC). Unfortunately, we were not able to command the Sprite deployment in time. While we are certainly disappointed that things did not go as planned, I think we still have a lot to be proud of.

Over 300 people from all over the world came together to make KickSat happen. We built a spacecraft, tested it, and launched it. Hundreds of people had their names flown in space, more than a dozen radio amateurs were able to receive signals from KickSat's beacon radio, and volunteers collected and processed telemetry data and predicted KickSat's orbit and reentry. This kind of participation is exactly what KickSat is all about and I'm glad we all got to share in this experience.

We've learned a lot from KickSat, and I plan to take those lessons and build an even better KickSat-2. This is only the beginning! Thank you all for your amazing support over the past two years. I hope you'll stick with us as we continue to try to make space something everyone can take part in.

- Zac "

[jumpjack]

Did I unerstand correctly?
This "satellite" consists of a bare PCB with some components & a solar panel mounted on it, and that's all?
And it should have survived space environment?
And it costed 30,000 %?

Before sending a circuit to the space... isn't a designer supposed to know something about space? Something like -100°C/+100°C range , ionizing radiation, cosmic rays and kilorads??

Why didn't anybody explained these things to the designer (and to backers) in last 4 years??

I'm astonished.

[Kabloona]

Did I unerstand correctly?
This "satellite" consists of a bare PCB with some components & a solar panel mounted on it, and that's all?
And it should have survived space environment?
And it costed 30,000 %?

Before sending a circuit to the space... isn't a designer supposed to know something about space? Something like -100°C/+100°C range , ionizing radiation, cosmic rays and kilorads??

Why didn't anybody explained these things to the designer (and to backers) in last 4 years??

I'm astonished.

Give him a break. Of course he "knows something about space." This was a PhD project with very limited funds. Nanosats like this with short lifetimes commonly use non-radiation-hardened parts that are vulnerable to SEU. He took a calculated risk and got unlucky.

[eriblo]

Did I unerstand correctly?
This "satellite" consists of a bare PCB with some components & a solar panel mounted on it, and that's all?
And it should have survived space environment?
And it costed 30,000 %?

Before sending a circuit to the space... isn't a designer supposed to know something about space? Something like -100°C/+100°C range , ionizing radiation, cosmic rays and kilorads??

Why didn't anybody explained these things to the designer (and to backers) in last 4 years??

I'm astonished.

Are you confusing the
KickSat - A fairly standard 1U CubeSat with a 2U dispenser containing over a hundred
Sprites - Small "bare PCBs with some components and solar cells" femtosatellites?

The Sprites "cost" 300 $ each and were only supposed to spend at most a few weeks in orbit before reentering. As far as I know both KickSat and the Sprites survived the space environment just fine. The satellite experienced an unfortunate radiation event that reset the deployment timer (an issue that will be designed for in the future) which delayed deployment of the Sprites. Otherwise it appears to have functioned as designed until reentry.

[jumpjack]

The Sprites "cost" 300 $ each and were only supposed to spend at most a few weeks in orbit before reentering.

Question is still valid: how are they supposed to survive even an hour? Have they any sort of envelope, case, boxing, or anything? It's not visible on the site.

[Lar]

The Sprites "cost" 300 $ each and were only supposed to spend at most a few weeks in orbit before reentering.

Question is still valid: how are they supposed to survive even an hour? Have they any sort of envelope, case, boxing, or anything? It's not visible on the site.

I don't think they do but I would ask, why do they need any of those things to achieve their mission and hit their cost point?

[Kabloona]

The Sprites "cost" 300 $ each and were only supposed to spend at most a few weeks in orbit before reentering.

Question is still valid: how are they supposed to survive even an hour? Have they any sort of envelope, case, boxing, or anything? It's not visible on the site.

No, the Sprites were tiny unshielded PC boards with a few components.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KickSat

The Sprites were expected to re-enter in a matter of days, so their design lifetime was short, yes. So, yeah, maybe a hundred thermal cycles or an unlucky cosmic ray kills it. But even an unshielded board can survive that environment a few days.

[Llian Rhydderch]

The Sprites "cost" 300 $ each and were only supposed to spend at most a few weeks in orbit before reentering.

Question is still valid: how are they supposed to survive even an hour? Have they any sort of envelope, case, boxing, or anything? It's not visible on the site.

No, the Sprites were tiny unshielded PC boards with a few components.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KickSat

The Sprites were expected to re-enter in a matter of days, so their design lifetime was short, yes. So, yeah, maybe a hundred thermal cycles or an unlucky cosmic ray kills it. But even an unshielded board can survive that environment a few days.

... and moreover, would provide some degree of statistically significant data on the short-term survival of such basic and low-cost technology had the deployment mechanism on the KickSat itself not have had the unfortunate radiation event.

[jumpjack]

I don't think they do but I would ask, why do they need any of those things to achieve their mission and hit their cost point?

yes, this is another good question; the real cost of each board is no more than 50$! I guess 300$ is just a fake cost to encourage more and more people to back the project, to cover launch costs.
Not so fair...

[jumpjack]

But even an unshielded board can survive that environment a few days.

No bare circuit could ever last a few minutes under direct sunlight in space: it would reach 200°C in a matter of seconds, also due to tiny mass.

... and moreover, would provide some degree of statistically significant data on the short-term survival of such basic and low-cost technology had the deployment mechanism on the KickSat itself not have had the unfortunate radiation event.

No doubt about valuable data retrievable from such a mission... but the most important would be: which is the minimum volume allowing providing thermal protection to a circuit in space? How long does it last with only passive cooling/heating?

[ChrisWilson68]

I don't think they do but I would ask, why do they need any of those things to achieve their mission and hit their cost point?

yes, this is another good question; the real cost of each board is no more than 50$! I guess 300$ is just a fake cost to encourage more and more people to back the project, to cover launch costs.
Not so fair...

That's really crazy.  Of course the $300 includes launch costs.  How is that "fake" or "not fair"?  They're getting launched into space, why wouldn't they pay their part of the launch costs?

[ChrisWilson68]

the demand might come from the consumer market.  While fault-tolerant high-availability systems are generally available only in the higher-end "enterprise class" of computing systems (servers, data storage controllers, etc.), at many times the price, the consumer market is large enough to drive change itself.  We could see a future, and possibly a near future, where consumer demand for better quality PCs/tablet/smartphones (fewer resets, need to reboot in the middle of important use of the device, etc.) may incent chip makers to package hardware in more-capable and more highly integrated chips/memory/storage specifically aimed at a consumer fault-tolerant market.

The vast majority of lock-ups, reboots, etc. on consumer devices today are due to software bugs, not cosmic rays or anything else.  There's already a lot of fault detection for hardware events even in embedded chips in consumer devices.

[jumpjack]

That's really crazy.  Of course the $300 includes launch costs.  How is that "fake" or "not fair"?  They're getting launched into space, why wouldn't they pay their part of the launch costs?

Then I would have written in the project page "Board cost is just xx$, but we need yy$ per each sprite to cover launch costs": this is supposed to be an educational project (I guess). I would also publish full design... unless they're trying to make money from this project... and I can't imagine how (and kickstarter itself is not supposed to be a method to earn money...).

[Chris Bergin]

Alright, let it go. We don't need 15 pages of this (which is what I fear may happen).

[jumpjack]

Why not? Version 2.0 of the project is already planned, I think some feedback and new ideas would be useful... to original designer or to next Space Pioneer! :-)

[Lar]

Why not? Version 2.0 of the project is already planned, I think some feedback and new ideas would be useful... to original designer or to next Space Pioneer! :-)

Because you were told not to. By the site owner. It's not clear to me how it could be made any clearer.

If you have an issue with a moderator action, use the PM button or the report to moderator button. DO NOT DEBATE onforum.

[Bob Shaw]

I'm certainly looking forward to KickSat II; as a participant, I have no issues with the performance of KickSat 1. It reached orbit (a minor miracle) and communicated with the ground. It had a failure, which was diagnosed but couldn't be corrected. Lessons were learned, and I hope they will be applied. At that point we will see the proof of concept with regard to the sprites themselves (hopefully the launch won't be subject to quite so many orbital limitations next time so that the actual lifetime of sprites can be identified).

All in all, I can't wait.

Now, about those thin-film, printed femtosats being sent to the Moon...

[mlindner]

Did I unerstand correctly?
This "satellite" consists of a bare PCB with some components & a solar panel mounted on it, and that's all?
And it should have survived space environment?
And it costed 30,000 %?

Before sending a circuit to the space... isn't a designer supposed to know something about space? Something like -100°C/+100°C range , ionizing radiation, cosmic rays and kilorads??

Why didn't anybody explained these things to the designer (and to backers) in last 4 years??

I'm astonished.

Most cubesats are bare PCBs possibly with some clear coating to stop screws and nuts vibrating loose and to improve heat conduction. I've not read about any cubesat that used rad-hardend parts as primary components (not saying there aren't any, I just haven't heard of any). You just eat the radiation and hope for the best. Cubesats don't use any heaters or cooling either. The single PCB sprites would have worked perfectly fine.

Just speaking as someone who actually built cubesats, observed live telemetry from code I wrote delivering the temperatures of said cubesat to our ground station, I don't think you know very much about the space environment at all. Just FYI.

I don't think they do but I would ask, why do they need any of those things to achieve their mission and hit their cost point?

yes, this is another good question; the real cost of each board is no more than 50$! I guess 300$ is just a fake cost to encourage more and more people to back the project, to cover launch costs.
Not so fair...

The parts may be $50, but labor isn't free. $300 is a pretty reasonable price for time and effort put into the sprites.

But even an unshielded board can survive that environment a few days.

No bare circuit could ever last a few minutes under direct sunlight in space: it would reach 200°C in a matter of seconds, also due to tiny mass.

Completely absurd. Sheets of copper (metal layers in a PCB) emit radiation quite well. The temperature would have done no such thing.

... and moreover, would provide some degree of statistically significant data on the short-term survival of such basic and low-cost technology had the deployment mechanism on the KickSat itself not have had the unfortunate radiation event.

No doubt about valuable data retrievable from such a mission... but the most important would be: which is the minimum volume allowing providing thermal protection to a circuit in space? How long does it last with only passive cooling/heating?

Probably years given other examples of cubesats built exactly the same way. There's been talk of making satellites that are literally strings of PCB boards floating around together chained together by their connector cables with no structure what-so-ever.

[mlindner]

I'd heard of FRAM memory, but didn't know it was used in microprocessors themselves - it's interesting to also note the longevity of PowerPC CPUs in space applications, long after Apple gave up on them!

Old post reply, but thought I'd mention PowerPC is used extensively many places. You probably have PowerPC processors in your car. They were/are the go-to main processor for vehicles AFAIK. I don't know much about the aero side but I would not be surprised to see them used extensively there as well.

[cosmicvoid]

... snip ... There's been talk of making satellites that are literally strings of PCB boards floating around together chained together by their connector cables with no structure what-so-ever.

That would be OK for on-orbit, but not so much for the G forces of launch and deployment, I think.

[mlindner]

... snip ... There's been talk of making satellites that are literally strings of PCB boards floating around together chained together by their connector cables with no structure what-so-ever.

That would be OK for on-orbit, but not so much for the G forces of launch and deployment, I think.

Thus why there's only "been talk" so far.

[Bob Shaw]

New post from Zac Manchester to the KickSat supporters:

"Remember the prototype Sprites I showed off during my original Kickstarter video?

Those were from the first batch of Sprites we made back in 2010. As some of you may know, we were lucky enough to be able to send three of those early prototypes to the ISS on STS-134 (the second-to-last Space Shuttle mission). The Sprites were installed on the outside of the space station as part of the MISSE-8 experiment, where they stayed for three years. Here are a couple of pictures from the spacewalk when MISSE-8 was installed (notice the three Sprites in the second photo).

In a very cool turn of events, MISSE-8 was returned to Earth on May 18 inside the same Dragon capsule that KickSat rode into space with as part of the CRS-3 mission. A few days ago our Sprites finally finished their long journey, making it all the way back to the lab at Cornell where they were made. As you can see, they've clearly been through a lot.

We were very curious to see how well the Sprites' off-the-shelf electronics held up to three years of space radiation. After a quick trip to the hardware store to track down an incandescent lamp (thanks to Ithaca's rainy weather, there wasn't enough real sunlight to power the Sprite's solar cells), we were to detect strong radio transmissions from two of the three Sprites. We still have a lot more testing to do, but this is a very promising first indication that the components we're using on the Sprites can survive for long periods of time in the harsh space environment. I'll keep you all posted as we learn more.

- Zac

Fascinating - and a serious on-orbit test of the components (exactly what many of the (negative) commentators on here were demanding).

Now, about KickSat 2...