- Courtesy: Cornell University/Provided
- Courtesy: Cornell University/Provided
Onboard space shuttle Endeavour — on target for launch this Friday — thin, one-inch square chips are headed for mounting on the International Space Station. Developed by technologists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the three fingernail-sized satellites are prototypes of big things to come in terms of space research.
“Their small size allows them to travel like space dust,” said Mason Peck, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell.
“Blown by solar winds, they can ‘sail’ to distant locations without fuel,” Peck said. “We’re actually trying to create a new capability and build it from the ground up. We want to learn what’s the bare minimum we can design for communication from space,” he said.
Exposure to space
The trio of chips will be affixed to the Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-8) pallet. The pallet will be attached to the space station, exposing the chips to the harsh conditions of space to see how they hold up and transmit data.
After return to Earth following a few years of space exposure, the chips on MISSE-8 will be studied to see how they held up during their space voyage.
The three prototypes were built entirely by Cornell undergraduates Zac Manchester (class of 2011) and Ryan Zhou (2010) and doctoral candidate Justin Atchison (2010).
Personal electronics
Peck said in a just-issued Cornell press statement that the prototypes are physically identical, but each transmits differently.
“That’s very important because it’s a pathfinder for something we hope to do in the future. We want to launch a huge number of these things simultaneously but still sort out which is which.”
The current prototypes are mostly made of commercial parts, but Peck’s group has partnered with Draper Lab in Boston to work on making a more space-ready prototype.
“We’re seeing such an explosion in personal electronics … all these components are super high performance, and they have far outstripped what the aerospace industry has at its disposal,” said Peck, noting that these technologies were used on the small satellites.
By LD/CSE