Four tiny spacecraft soared over the California desert June 15 in a high-altitude demonstration flight that tested the sensor and equipment designs created by NASA engineers and student launch teams.
The satellites, known as CubeSats, lifted off from the Friends of Amateur Rocketry launch site in the Mojave Desert aboard a Prospector 18 rocket, built by Garvey Spacecraft Corp. of Long Beach.
Data recorded by the CubeSats' onboard sensors during Saturday's flight test will help characterize the environment and loads the small satellites encountered during flight -- information that's critical to the scientists and engineers developing similar spacecraft for future missions.
CubeSats are 4-inch cubes that pack a lot of capability into their small size. While they typically fly as secondary payloads on larger missions involving bigger spacecraft and rockets, the goal is to eventually have the option of launching them as the primary payload on smaller rockets.
Cubesats are a marvelous technological development. But any launching of cubesats on smaller rockets will undoubtedly be co-opted by more powerful interests. A constellation of cubesats carrying precision hyperspectral cameras that would comb near Earth space for anomalous flying objects would really be instructive, but likley troublesome for the powers that be. ;-) To read more, click here.