Student Project Shows Sails Can De-Orbit Satellites Quickly
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A prototype satellite built to test a deployable drag sail to de-orbit satellites appears to have fulfilled its purpose, burning up on re-entry earlier this month after spending just 445 days in orbit.
SBUDNIC, an acronym chosen to be a play on "Sputnik," was put together by students at Brown University, Rhode Island, using low-cost off-the-shelf commercial components. The CubeSat design featured a drag sail made from Kapton polyimide film, and with structural supports of thin aluminum tubing, which deployed once the satellite was in orbit.
[...] The project appears to have been successful in this respect, according to tracking data the team obtained from US Space Command. It indicated that SBUDNIC was about 470 kilometers (292 miles) above the Earth in early March, while other comparably sized satellites deployed to a similar orbit as part of the same mission were still at altitudes of 500 kilometers (310 miles) or more.
[...] Previous predictions had suggested that the drag device would reduce the orbital lifetime of SBUDNIC from over 20 years to as few as 6.5 years, but in reality it was brought down in about a year and a quarter.
[...] "Rather than taking junk out of space after it becomes a problem, we have this $30 drag device you can just throw onto satellites and radically reduce how long they're in space," Ganjikunta said.
Of course, this requires future satellites to be designed to have a similar mechanism built in, and so does not help to address existing space junk, but every little presumably helps.
SBUDNIC was a 3U CubeSat, meaning it was effectively the size of three 10cm cubes joined together. It was based around a $10 Arduino system plus 65 AA lithium batteries and included a variety of 3D-printed parts produced with consumer-grade printers.
Previously: Student Satellite Demos Drag Sail to De-orbit Old Hardware
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