Southern Star's SkyCube: a Social Media Space Mission

Southern Stars Group LLC, the company responsible for the popular SkySafari apps for iOS, Android and Mac OS X, is thinking a little bigger with its next project.

The publicly funded SkyCube is a miniature CubeSat satellite that will orbit the planet, transmitting low-resolution images of the Earth while broadcasting short messages from sponsors in the form of data pings. In short, it's the world's first social space mission.

The hardware involved in the project isn't anything we haven't seen before. The satellite itself is a 10x10x10 cm (3.9 cubic-inch) “1U” CubeSat, which is the current leading picosatellite standard with nearly 100 of the devices built and launched to date.

The SkyCube will be the second payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, set to launch sometime in 2013.

Once deployed, it will orbit more than 300 miles (483 km) up, taking low-resolution pictures and broadcasting short, simple messages from the project's sponsors as it crosses over most of the world's inhabited regions.

At the end of the mission, the SkyCube will deploy its 10 ft (3 m) diameter balloon, making it visible from the Earth, with a brightness akin to that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

If everything goes to plan, the miniature satellite will eventually return to Earth, brought down by atmospheric drag.

So if you want to broadcast your own short message from space, the Southern Stars Group has got your back, with pledges starting at just US$1.

This base option gives you a ten-second time slot on the mission, in which you can broadcast a single 120-character message.

The sponsorship options go all the way up to $10k, for which the company will fly two people out to Cape Canaveral from anywhere in the continental US.

From there, sponsors can watch the satellite lift off and once it's successfully in orbit, they can control the SkyCube for an entire day to take pictures, send messages, or just sit back and contemplate the balance of their bank accounts.

MicroThrust Ion Engine Could Place Cubesats in Lunar Orbit

The video shows an interview with Herbert Shea by the EPFL University news.

The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) has announced it has developed a lightweight propulsion system that could propel small satellites to the Moon using only 100mL of fuel.

The entire propulsion system, which comprises an electric ion engine powered by photovoltaic solar cells, weighs only 200g including propellant, and is small enough to fit within the limited envelope of a standard CubeSat nanosatellite.

“The big limitation [of current nanosatellites] is that [they’re] stuck in whatever orbit they’re put in” says Herbert Shea, Associate Professor at the EPFL. “To free them, we need a very efficient, miniaturized propulsion system. […] [MicroThrust] is very efficient, and using only this very small volume, we could send such a satellite from Earth orbit to Moon orbit.”

Although the system only works in space and could not be used to launch from Earth, if successful, the Microthrust system could greatly increase the list of potential applications for nanosatellites, which are currently limited to use in low Earth orbit.

“You can then go to Mars, you can go to the Moon, you can go to asteroids, you can do all sorts of science exploration missions that are today impossible for Universities and for many countries because of the high cost” explained Shea.

EPFL has already announced plans for the Microthrust system to fly on two missions. The first is the Orbital Low Frequency Array, or OLFAR, which intends to create a distributed low-frequency radio astronomy array in space using nanosatellites.

Microthrust could be used to propel the array of satellites beyond the Moon where they could look deeper into the universe. EPFL is also planning to use MicroThrust on the CleanSpaceOne satellite, which intends to demonstrate active removal of space debris using a 3U Cubesat.

The propulsion system has been designed to fit within the Cubesat standard, developed by California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University in 1999 to encourage universities and amateur space enthusiasts to develop standard hardware and increase accessibility to space.

The standard designates a single unit (or “1U”) as a cubic nanosatellite weighing approximately 1kg and measuring 10cm along each outer edge. Cubesats can be either 1U in size, or any integer multiple for larger more complex missions.

The UK CubeSail: Tackling Space Debris

The first spacecraft designed to do away with itself was unveiled on Friday. It will try out an idea that could stop space getting clogged up with junk orbiting the Earth.

The debris of abandoned spacecraft and satellites is building up in low Earth orbit. This zero-g scrapheap has grown by 40 per cent in the past four years alone, with the US air force now tracking 19,000 orbiting objects larger than 10 centimetres across. And as chunks of debris strike each other, they fragment further – presenting still more threat of collision to working spacecraft.

The diminutive CubeSail craft, measuring 30 by 10 by 10 centimetres and weighing just 3 kilograms, has been designed at the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. It has a solar sail that it can use for propulsion – harnessing the pressure of sunlight, just as a boat's sail harnesses the pressure of the wind – but it can also use the sail as an "orbital brake" to help it de-orbit to a fiery death in the atmosphere.