Arduino in space. 23 days left to order 3 days of satellite rental for $ 325
25 sensors, sensors and cameras in earth orbit under the control of the Arduino for only three hundred dollars for three days or five hundred - for a week, the ArduSat project on Kickstarter offers rewards. Three weeks before the end of the fundraising, almost the entire amount has already been collected, so it can be said with confidence that the research mini-satellite will be launched in 2013 into an orbit of 400-600 km. The service life of the satellite will be from four months to one and a half years.
The satellite is a cube with a side of 10 cm, weighing about a kilogram, or 1 unit of the CubeSat format. This standard for small satellites was developed in 1999 by Stanford and California Polytechnic Universities. The standard allows launching satellites up to 3U (10X10X30 cm). The cost of one satellite, together with the delivery to orbit, is several tens of thousands of dollars, which allows even small universities and companies to launch them. About the support of the project ArduSat has already announced the company GOMspace - manufacturer of electronics for satellites of the format Cube Sat.
The ArduSat project goes even further and makes space exploration accessible to everyone. To control the satellite is used arduino. On board are three cameras, a Geiger counter, a spectrometer, a magnetometer, a thermometer, a gyroscope, an ozone sensor, and much more. If significantly more than the minimum 35 thousand dollars are collected, the size of the satellite can be increased to 2U or even 3U, with a corresponding increase in the variety of sensors. For the positioning of the satellite are magnetic torque motors - electromagnets that rotate the apparatus, “leaning” on the magnetic field of the Earth.
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In order for Arduino boards not intended for work in space to work, despite radiation and extreme conditions, the satellite will contain several identical modules duplicating each other. The satellite is too small to use any protection against radiation, but this is not necessary - most likely it will enter the dense layers of the atmosphere and burn before the electronics completely lose their operation.
The satellite will be put into orbit using one of the spacecraft that support the CubeSat format - the team is already negotiating with organizations planning such launches next year, or as “baggage” will be delivered to the ISS during one of the scheduled flights and will be released open space through the gateway station. A backup option is a commercial launch. This is more expensive, but the launch schedule may be more flexible.
To use the satellite at your own discretion, you must pay for the rental time (so far, kickstarter has a preferential price for early participants) and submit the program for the Arduino for testing. The team will check it on the test bench, and if everything is in order, it will load it on the satellite. Data from sensors and cameras, obtained as a result of her work, will be transmitted to Earth and sent to the customer. The specific Arduino model onboard the satellite will be refined after the end of the fundraising. Detailed specifications of all sensors and library functions for working with them will be available later on the project website.
The authors of the project even promise that it will be possible to control the position of the device in real time, for example, having fixed the gyroscope on the head, to steer the satellite from the Earth, getting a picture from the cameras, that is, to practically turn the head in space.
For those who are not familiar with microcontroller programming, there are easier options - for $ 150 you can order 15 pictures from an arbitrary angle, and for 300 you can relay a short message via satellite when it flies over a certain point on Earth.
The satellite is a cube with a side of 10 cm, weighing about a kilogram, or 1 unit of the CubeSat format. This standard for small satellites was developed in 1999 by Stanford and California Polytechnic Universities. The standard allows launching satellites up to 3U (10X10X30 cm). The cost of one satellite, together with the delivery to orbit, is several tens of thousands of dollars, which allows even small universities and companies to launch them. About the support of the project ArduSat has already announced the company GOMspace - manufacturer of electronics for satellites of the format Cube Sat.
The ArduSat project goes even further and makes space exploration accessible to everyone. To control the satellite is used arduino. On board are three cameras, a Geiger counter, a spectrometer, a magnetometer, a thermometer, a gyroscope, an ozone sensor, and much more. If significantly more than the minimum 35 thousand dollars are collected, the size of the satellite can be increased to 2U or even 3U, with a corresponding increase in the variety of sensors. For the positioning of the satellite are magnetic torque motors - electromagnets that rotate the apparatus, “leaning” on the magnetic field of the Earth.
')
In order for Arduino boards not intended for work in space to work, despite radiation and extreme conditions, the satellite will contain several identical modules duplicating each other. The satellite is too small to use any protection against radiation, but this is not necessary - most likely it will enter the dense layers of the atmosphere and burn before the electronics completely lose their operation.
The satellite will be put into orbit using one of the spacecraft that support the CubeSat format - the team is already negotiating with organizations planning such launches next year, or as “baggage” will be delivered to the ISS during one of the scheduled flights and will be released open space through the gateway station. A backup option is a commercial launch. This is more expensive, but the launch schedule may be more flexible.
To use the satellite at your own discretion, you must pay for the rental time (so far, kickstarter has a preferential price for early participants) and submit the program for the Arduino for testing. The team will check it on the test bench, and if everything is in order, it will load it on the satellite. Data from sensors and cameras, obtained as a result of her work, will be transmitted to Earth and sent to the customer. The specific Arduino model onboard the satellite will be refined after the end of the fundraising. Detailed specifications of all sensors and library functions for working with them will be available later on the project website.
The authors of the project even promise that it will be possible to control the position of the device in real time, for example, having fixed the gyroscope on the head, to steer the satellite from the Earth, getting a picture from the cameras, that is, to practically turn the head in space.
For those who are not familiar with microcontroller programming, there are easier options - for $ 150 you can order 15 pictures from an arbitrary angle, and for 300 you can relay a short message via satellite when it flies over a certain point on Earth.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/146263/
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