How to deploy a satellite and what are the costs?
How to deploy a satellite and what are the costs?
Hello,
I'm into microcontrollers and programming and would love to send my own small cube satellite into space (one day).
But there are a few things I have zero experience with, and these are:
- When the satellite is in space, it needs to correct its position to always point the camera on earth
- During launch of the rocket my cube sat needs to be as robust as possible
- I can not manufacture the case myself
- Power supply + battery
- Providing in-orbit (OTA) updates - This needs to be bullet-proof working
- Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more
- Software security best practices in orbit
- Suitable ground station hardware
- Which deployment orbit
- Deployment mechanism
- Radiation-hardened MCUs and SBCs - Which models? I just know consumer models like ESP32, STM, Raspberry Pico, Arduino, etc.
Can you recommend a good read on that? A book or pdf? Is there anyone with experience?
(This project is btw on my bucket list before I die, it's not urgent though)
Best,
\
q1p
I looked into CubeSats in a previous job. Basically, there are four questions:
Part 1: this is the back of the napkin sketch. What are you trying to do? Weather, water, fire, radiation, or air data? Imaging? Has anyone already done this? What's the plan?
Part 2: you can DIY the whole thing, starting with the CalPoly CubeSat workshops: https://www.cubesat.org/. They're the folks that started the whole thing.
There are also kits and services out there. One example is Pumpkin: https://www.pumpkinspace.com/, but there are a lot of others like it out there. You want to figure out what sensors you need, mechanisms to orient the sensors, radios, power management, etc. Also, what's the lifespan before it descends into the atmosphere and burns out.
Part 3: The big problem is launch. You need to eventually get it up into space. There are commercial services, but you're looking at $10K-$50K and up to get into the queue. Another option is to go through NASA's Launch Intitiative: https://www.nasa.gov/kennedy/launch-services-program/cubesat-launch-initiative/ or ESA's Fly Your Satellite program: https://www.esa.int/Education/CubeSats_-_Fly_Your_Satellite
These require being part of a non-profit or educational institution. And the waiting list is long. Like, years.
Part 4: OK, now that you got it up in space, what do you do with the data? It's circling the globe and there's a narrow window where the radio can connect to an earth station, send the data, and maybe receive instructions like where to point the sensors. Forget about OTA. You won't have a large enough connection window or bandwidth to do that.
You can roll your own comms, or you can see about using an existing service, like AWS Ground Station: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/. Microsoft had a similar service called Azure Orbital, but they retired it last year.
After all is said and done, you now have some cool data. You'll want to process it and use it for something. This goes back to step 1. Figure out what's the purpose, what you want to get out of it, and work backward. You can use the AWS service, pipe it into an S3 bucket or store it in a database, then run analytics and visualizations on it. If you want realtime, it'll cost extra.
It won't be cheap, but it will likely be a lot of fun. I proposed several projects in a past life. We got pretty far, but the launch window was years away and by then I was heading out. All this is an infodump of what I learned back then. Hope this helps.