ArduSat: A Real Satellite Mission That You Can Be a Part Of
We’ve been writing a lot recently about how the private space industry is poised to make space cheaper and more accessible. But in general, this is for outfits such as NASA, not people like you and me.
Today, a company called NanoSatisfi is launching a Kickstarter project to send an Arduino-powered satellite into space, and you can send an experiment along with it.
Whether it’s private industry or NASA or the ESA or anyone else, sending stuff into space is expensive. It also tends to take approximately forever to go from having an idea to getting funding to designing the hardware to building it to actually launching something. NanoSatisfi, a tech startup based out of NASA’s Ames Research Center here in Silicon Valley, is trying to change all of that (all of it) by designing a satellite made almost entirely of off-the-shelf (or slightly modified) hobby-grade hardware, launching it quickly, and then using Kickstarter to give you a way to get directly involved.
ArduSat is based on the CubeSat platform, a standardized satellite framework that measures about four inches on a side and weighs under three pounds. It’s just about as small and cheap as you can get when it comes to launching something into orbit, and while it seems like a very small package, NanoSatisfi is going to cram as much science into that little cube as it possibly can.
Here’s the plan: