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It's basically for buildings small spacecraft that can be used to test out
various technologies, or science experiments, or things of that nature.
When it's all put together it's about eighteen inches across, about a foot tall
and it's
no more massive than a single person can pick up by themselves. What these satellites
are really good for is taking
a process that you're still learning how to do, like make a certain kind of
measurement
and iterate on how do you make that measurement and make it better
and design your instrument better,
because the costs of going to space with a full up space craft is so high
you've gotta do it perfectly the first time.
Well if you could back off on that a little bit
and do it in an iterative fashion,
and do it so you build a little, fly a little, build a little, fly a little...
and make it so that you
you learn as you go and improve as you go, hopefully ten years down the road you've
had several missions
and you've learned a lot and now you're making the real measurements you wanna
make with high reliability.
What we're doing right now is we're getting all the pieces to talk to each
other and getting them up and running
um... like most good engineers we're fighting with getting the Windows
installed on the on the flight computer and making it work right.
People think we're nuts for putting Windows on, but the reason we're doing
that is uh... right now
we're testing out some different concepts and it's a lot easier to do
that in a Windows environment where we can use things like LabView and some
other utilities
and test and how it's going to work.
We're using a very small computer, it's what's called a PC104. It's a
very capable little computer
and it makes it easy for us to write programs on and test things out,
so this is really a test environment.
I also have some
interface standards that I want to try out, that haven't been tried out in the
small environment,
that make it easy to do plug-and-play components
So like in your regular computer where you just plug something in the USB port.
One of things i'm really interested is can we apply that philopsophy in the
sattelite and just take an instrument plug it in
and have it reconfigure and come up and running right away. I've be talking with
a number of different researchers on site
to try to figure out what might be some candidate
science instruments that we could try out in this environment. So we're trying
to test out
some basic sensors and see how they work
and invite other people to bring in sensors they may have and see what it
would take to actually fly it in this configuration.
Where I hope NASA is interested in all of this is for testing out new technologies
and new science detection methods, things of that nature,
that you just don't know how they're going to work. And you don't want to
build a whole
multi-million dollar,
you know, hundreds of millions of dollars spacecraft if you've never tried out
the measurement, first.