The $99 Satellite

The rule of the game is called \u27shared economy\u27. Some of the most successful companies in the world don\u27t own the assets they sell. Uber, the largest taxi company in the world, does not own taxis. Airbnb doesn’t own the houses they rent. This was already the case in the past. For example, tour operators didn\u27t own the hotels in their portfolio. The difference, with respect to Airbnb and Uber, is that in these cases the assets are privately owned and shared with customers. The big revolution of the shared economy is happening thanks to the Internet. The users can check and score the quality of the service, the owners, the honesty and their reliability. How does this relate to small sats? In the case of space assets, privately owned satellites can’t be rented through a \u27Spacebnb\u27. Not yet, at least. With the proliferation of cubesat and picosats, the question is when and how it will happen, rather than if it will happen. The following question is: how will this affect the design and operations of the next generation picosatellites, the space business and the companies currently operating in the sector? Very often when talking about technology innovation we use words like evolution or revolution. In case of the shared economy, it\u27s more appropriate to talk about transformation. This paper evaluates and discusses new types of business schemes and possible design evolution of small sats that will transform the space business. In a future that might be closer than we think, we may able to rent a satellite, and use it for our own purposes, for just 99$ per application

The Beauty of Copying (and of Being Copied)

How does knowledge spread and make a community growing? Is it copying somebody else good or bad? Should we re-invent the wheel? The ‘non invented here’ syndrome is as an expression used when a team rejects good ideas coming from others, and then time is wasted to re-invent the same solution. Copying someone else’s idea is plagiarism, infringement of patents, un-ethical, or simply not exciting. At the same time, local economic realities, where companies located in a limited geographical area develop similar products, generate new ideas and growth. In some situations, imitating each other, competing for skilled personnel, brings economic growth to an entire region. One example is the Silicon Valley, where in the late eighties, companies working in the field of personal computers, closely interacting one with each other developed an entirely new economy. A valley, once known for walnuts, is now the icon of innovation, high technology and a booming economy. Would that have worked if ideas, skilled resources, and products were kept secret and isolated one from each other? Companies need to protect their inventions to survive in a high competitive market. New products are the results of years of work and large investments. High-tech companies exploit IPRs to generate revenues, letting other copying will surely be detrimental for their bottom line. On the other side, being too protective can be counterproductive, as it limits free circulation of ideas that may lead to inventions and new products. Where is the balance between being open and protective, so new ideas can freely spur and leading companies can keep the edge? Could local economic conditions, maturity of the technology, market volume favor one approach or the other? Is the cubesat phenomenon prone to produce local economy realities where champion companies are concentrated in a small region, or will they remain a global phenomenon? Similar consideration applies to satellite big data. Is free access to satellites data providing new opportunities or killing the return of investment of space assets? Should governments enforce free access to data, as for the European Copernicus or protect the business of space industry manufacturing space assets delivering data? This paper presents the result of the analysis conducted in various market sectors, such as high tech, fashion, art and literature. The analysis reports that in some cases, being over protective has proven to be counterproductive. The work also compares the evolution of other market sectors with the current situation of the Space business, where small satellites and cubesat are game changers in the production of big data. Finally, some considerations are presented on new business opportunities made possible thanks to the free access to large data set. The paper also addresses, with real life examples, what can be considered a deontological approach to free circulation of ideas that gives a better growth to the sector without loosing the leading edge. Some conclusions are presented on how the intervention of governments can generate or inhibit new local economies, with specific reference to the access to big data

MicroMHiDe: A Multispectral Sub-Meter Resolution Payload for SmallSats

The Earth Observation market has been going through a complete mutation during the last decade with the deployment of constellations of nano- and smallsats. These can offer shorter revisit time and capture relevant information for specific applications, and this for a significantly lower cost

Baffles design of the PROBA-V wide FOV TMA

Proba-V payload is a successor of the Vegetation instrument, a multispectral imager flown on Spot-4 and subsequently on Spot-5, French satellites for Earth Observation and defence. The instrument, with its wide field of view, is capable of covering a swath of 2200 km, which, in combination with a polar low Earth orbit, guarantees a daily revisit. The lifetime of Spot-5 expires in early 2013, and to ensure the continuity of vegetation data, BELSPO, the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office, supported the development of an instrument that could be flown on a Proba type satellite, a small satellite developed by the Belgian QinetiQ Space (previously known as Verhaert Space). The challenge of this development is to produce an instrument responding to the same user requirements as Vegetation, but with an overall mass of about 30 kg, while the Vegetation instrument mass is 130 kg. This development had become feasible thanks to a number of new technologies that have been developed since the nineties, when Vegetation was first conceived, namely Single Point Diamond Turning fabrication of aspherical mirrors and efficient VNIR and SWIR detectors. The Proba-V payload is based on three identical reflective telescopes using highly aspherical mirrors in a TMA (Three Mirrors Anastigmat) configuration. Each telescope covers a field of view of 34o to reach the required swath. One of the challenges in the development of the PROBA-V instrument is the efficient reduction of stray light. Due to the mass and volume constraints it was not possible to implement a design with an intermediate focus to reduce the stray light. The analysis and minimization of the in-field stray light is an important element of the design because of the large FOV and the surface roughness currently achievable with the Single Point Diamond Turning. This document presents the preliminary baffle layout designed for the Three Mirrors Anastigmatic (TMA) telescope developed for the Proba-V mission. This baffling is used to avoid 1st order stray light i.e. direct stray light or through reflections on the mirrors. The stray light from the SWIR folding mirror is also studied. After these preliminary analyses the mechanical structure of the TMA is designed then verified in term of vignetting and stray light

Laboratory demonstration of a primary active mirror for space with the LATT: large aperture telescope technology

The LATT project is an ESA contract under TRP programme to demonstrate the scalability of the technology from ground-based adaptive mirrors to space active primary mirrors. A prototype spherical mirror based on a 40 cm diameter 1 mm thin glass shell with 19 contactless, voice-coil actuators and co-located position sensors have been manufactured and integrated into a final unit with an areal density lower than 20 kg/m2. Laboratory tests demonstrated the controllability with very low power budget and the survival of the fragile glass shell exposed to launch accelerations, thanks to an electrostatic locking mechanism; such achievements pushes the technology readiness level toward 5. With this prototype, the LATT project explored the feasibility of using an active and lightweight primary for space telescopes. The concept is attractive for large segmented telescopes, with surface active control to shape and co-phase them once in flight. In this paper we will describe the findings of the technological advances and the results of the environmental and optical tests

The Food Chain of the Small Satellites Ecosystem

…In a food chain of a biological system, plants (or producers) fix energy from the Sun and use inorganic material to manufacture complex organic substances; consumers (e.g. birds, mammals) use the energy fixed by plants as their nutrients; finally decomposers (e.g. bacteria), break down dead organisms and release nutrients back to the environment for use by the producers… The Space Business can be seen as a class of ecosystems, where the producers (equipment suppliers) transform raw materials by using the energy (funds). Consumers (the users) use data and services provided by the satellites to release back the nutrients in form of need of better services and more accurate data: these products generate more funds. This chain creates a stable system. In Small Sat business the cost affects the design approach and the way funds are shared among all the actors. Producers and consumers live in symbiosis to minimize costs and improve their survivability. Design to Cost approach has been already used as design philosophies in small satellite missions, but this does not explain why some Small Satellites experiences give birth to a stable system, while other don’t. With some remarkable exceptions, many of the Small Satellites have been one-of-a-kind. Will the Small Sat approach become a self sustained ecosystem with a longer lifetime of products and consumers? The objective is to define a metric to evaluate the stability of a new programme. It also sees the small satellite in a wider perspective to help small satellite to enter other Ecosystems

When Quantity Matters…

Quality and performance are very often the design drivers of engineers working on Space Projects. Reliability and availability of space systems are requirements on a single unit. In case the unit fails or underperforms, the mission is not accomplished or seriously compromised. The Quality Assurance has the task of making sure that the satellite complies with the specifications and operates flawless for the entire life. In mass production, the role of Quality Assurance is to minimize, not to eliminate, the number of defects. A certain number of defective units are acceptable. They are repaired or replaced during the guarantee period.How far are satellites from the point where the production cost is so low that replacing a defective unit is cheaper than ensuring it is defective free? Once the satellite market has reached that point, we can say that quantity matters more than quality. In recent years, space projects have seen the deployment of recurrent units for constellations, as GPS, Iridium, Globalstar, and others. Still the number of recurrent units is too small to make a difference.We still need to reach the point where satellites can be built and launched for a fraction of the present cost. Do technologies and methodologies of small satellites play a role to reach the turning point where quantity makes the difference? Is there any market requiring enough recurrent units to push down the development cost per unit to a negligible level?The paper analyzes the technology maturity of small satellites and shows how far small satellites are from the point where the quantity matters more than quality. The work analyses market dynamics and how non-space technologies may play a new role in deploying new space assets. The paper shows the pace at which space technologies are approaching the turning point where quantity matters more than quality

Creativity: The Critical Element for Mission Success

Can creativity be the critical element for the success of a Space Mission? Problem solving methodologies, as brainstorming, are familiar for finding solutions to technical problems. The analytical skills to solve problems and the creativity required to invent new products may appear similar, but they are profoundly different. Creativity requires a different mindset than problem solving. In sectors where the engineering process depends on creative thinkers new ways of technology development need to be defined. The objective of the mission Rosetta to land on a comet is well defined. For most of cubesat missions, the problem is posed the other way around: to find an interesting application achievable with the strict resources of a cubesat. Creativity, more that problem solving, is the ‘rule of the game’ of cubesat. This paper presents how conventional approaches to problem solving can lead, for cubesat missions, to deadlock situations. Creativity, coupled with high tech engineering process, becomes a critical piece for finding new uses of cubesats, and therefore critical for securing the new missions. Moving from problem solving to a creative process has been experimented on the Hypercube, a hyperspectral instrument in a cubesat. The paper presents how to bring a mentality shift to evolve from problem solving to a creative environment, instrumental to face the challenges of the evolution of the small satellites

TROPOMI, A Stepping Stone for Global Troposphere Monitoring

Accurate Earth Observation measurements can only be achieved by multi-spacecraft missions. One example is the Sentinels constellation where five satellites will cover the full spectrum of Earth Observation tasks: all-weather imagery (Sentinel 1), land observation (Sentinel 2), marine services (Sentinels 3), weather forecast (Sentinel 4), and atmospheric chemistry (Sentinel 5). The synergic operation of this constellation will constitute an important element of the European system “Global Monitoring for Environment and Security”. A co-operation between ESA and NSO has been set to deploy a precursor of the Sentinel-5 mission. The satellite will embark TROPOMI an instrument designed to reach the goal of boosting performance two orders of magnitude with respect to missions in operation. The mission, with its dual role of technology demonstrator and operative element of the GMES, poses unprecedented challenges: a tight schedule to achieve in-orbit demonstration and a complex procurement to respect the industrial return of the participating nations. TROPOMI uses groundbreaking technologies to bring spatial resolution, global coverage and measurement accuracy to unmatched levels. This paper presents an overview of the mission and describes the technologies developed to achieve the mission objectives. The innovations used in TROPOMI are at their early stage of development and may lead to revolutionary architectures

Compact Optical Payload for Daily Survey of Vegetation from Small Satellites

Recent advancement of optics fabrication, metrology and detectors are the basis for the development of a new compact instrument designed to provide daily revisit for the analysis of vegetation. The instrument has been optimized to improve multispectral imaging capabilities with respect to Spot-Vegetation, while minimizing mass and power to be accommodated on a small satellite. The new technologies used for this instrument allow shrinking the mass and reducing the power consumption of a factor 5 with respect to Spot-Vegetation. The new instrument is designed to fly on Proba-V, a small satellite developed to ensure continuation of the Spot-Vegetation products.The paper gives an overview of the payload, presents its performance and explains which innovations allow a very compact design. In particular, the paper presents the technology used for the fabrication of mirrors, the approach used for their alignment, and the tests results obtained so far on the first prototype of the telescope. A section of the paper describes the InGaAs detector developed for the SWIR channel, a long linear array able to operate uncooled. The paper concludes with a description of the mission, of the payload accommodation on the small satellite, and of the data produced