Kicksat burned up, including Sprites

[6581]

Unfortunate turn of events - the on-board computer reset after launch (probably due to radiation) and with it the timer for releasing the sprite femtosatellites, and the radio receiver didn't work due to insufficient supply voltage, so the sprites couldn't be released manually either.

[adestefan]

These are in such low orbit that they're still within the Van Allen belts. Vibration during launch rattling something loose is the more likely culprit.

[sigil]

Were the components radiation-hardened, or did they just wing it?

[fyrabanks]

This is why NASA spends millions, not tens of thousands, of dollars to send things to space.

[z3phyr]

I have heard that neuromorphic analog computers do not need to be radiation hardened. Also they are very power efficient. Can more research work on this side bring the cost of onboard control computers down?

[steve19]

One backer paid $10,000 to be the person who hit the big red button that would launch all the 'sprites' into space... damn.

[nkozyra]

They can still hit a big red button, I guess.

[coldcode]

It really is rocket science. Putting stuff into space is always hard.

[eps]

Wait, wait ... So they were asking for 30K, got 70K and that let them hitch a ride on a NASA rocket and have a satellite deployed. This seems oddly affordable. What am I missing?

[dm2]

The KickSat was very small, about half the size of a desktop computer.

There are satellites that are bus-sized and have antennas as large as a football field (5-6 tons and 350 foot antennas) floating around up there, those are the billion dollar ones. Their computer components are hundreds and thousands of times what consumer grade components cost, plus the satellites sometimes have stealth technologies, boosters, and extremely expensive cameras and other sensors.

The KickSat hardware was consumer grade, which was most of the reason for the low cost, the lack of sufficiently radiation hardened components also was the reason it malfunctioned according to their update.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NROL-32b_ULA_21NOV201... carrying one large satellite

[comrh]

Awesome project. I think it is pretty imaginative. What about the idea that sending a bunch of rocket payloads up there would add to the space debris already up there though?

[pekk]

"Up there" often doesn't mean a stable orbit.

[spiritplumber]

Ooops. I'm happy PhoneSat worked.

[icantthinkofone]

I've not followed this at all but the ARRL was launching satellites decades ago when I was a ham. Whatever happened to all that? (Yeah, I guess I should be Googling.)

[abruzzi]

There are actually a bunch up there:

http://oscar.dcarr.org

[Gracana]

I remember AO-40 when I was first getting into ham radio around the millennium. They experienced quite a slew of problems with that one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AO-40