Dang. 3D printing could make a huge impact in this field, it'll be exciting to see the stuff that gets made. They can even 3D print metals now, but you could get some seriously compact light structures 3D printing these little guys, metal or not.
yessss and no. Electronics in space are super sensitive to particulate and a problem with 3D printing is that many of the materials offgas. My satellite has never been outside of a clean room, and even in the clean room, so much as breathing on it or touching it without a ground could be detrimental. So if you want to get lightweight with composites, you have to be a little tricky. Even certain epoxies will destroy your mission. As for metal, yes and no again. Cold welding to the launch vehicle is a large problem, so when you launch CubeSats the structure is usually set by standard to be hard anodized 7075. I think there are some advances that need to be made before structures can be effectively 3D printed. Then there are some other requirements you need to meet... vibrational testing and thermal-vac testing. Composites don't tend to do with with temperature fluctuations, and from my own experimentation, I found that lightweight things like the high temp resin from FormLabs is too brittle for a lot of applications. And then weight isn't really all that problematic. Cubesats are so small that it's pretty easy to stay under weight limit. The one I just finished working on had to be below 7kg and, giving basically no mind to weight it barely passed the 4kg mark. I would be pretty interested maybe not in weight but in creating some organic or different shaped things. Interesting idea, certainly, but at least in my experience, you're better off making your G-Code for a CNC.
Amazing video as always! One small correction, in ECR propulsion systems (best example but not for small scale is VASIMR) it is a magnetic nozzle that propels the ionized gas, not an electrically charged one. In ECR systems, although it uses ionized particles, the net charge of the plasma is neutral as no electrons were taken nor added to the gas, relying solely on microwaves for ionization. The upside is you don't need to have parts which stick into the hot plasma and wear out like the cathodes on classic ion engines, downside is it is more power hungry and the heat from the high current electromagnets can be tricky to manage. But you got the important aspects and it key implications right. Keep up the amazing content!
@@quietsamurai1998 A standard Rubik's cube is 6cm on each side, so the cubesat is definitely a bit bigger. But I agree it's close enough for the comparison in the video to be valid.
@@JAlexCarney That's like saying a human is about 10 feet tall. Also, if we're being exceptionally nit picky, Rubik's cubes are 5.7 cm, but your 6 cm is an acceptable approximation.
@@landonkryger Compared to a skyscraper, yeah 10ft is an adequate approximation of human height. Compared with what most people think of when they think satellites, a cubesat is roughly the size of a rubix cube.
I've been reading about electric solar wind sails a while back. That seems like the smartest way because you can just unfurl some wires and use solar panels to generate electric fields to create a virtual sail in the solar wind and maneuver your satellite. Theoretically you have unlimited thrust. Unfortunately they don't work in the earths magnetosphere :(
But you might be able to use electrodynamic tethering. if you can unfurl a long enough wire and get it rotating in the magnetic feild, you can use that to generate electrical gradients in the wire.
Dejay - Check out Foresail-1 and Foresail-2 Cubesats, they are going to test the electric sailing tech in space. FS-1 with application called plasma brake as a deorbiting tool, and FS-2 as propulsion method.
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Klax0n nah in comparison legal has a Bare min of 20% tax on top of the base price being twice as high. Dealers are by far cheap in comparison worse with edibles
@@o11o01 I've been moving around a bit for work lately but rn I'm in new England area and mass is still new at it so I'm hoping prices go down like other states have after a few years. Even those were expensive when I was there. Glad the price went down
@@gags730 I worked on one launching w/Virgin Oribt, and I have a new distributed system I'm working on. The first used magentorquers which fine for the applicability. It is a science mission for NASA so all we really need is to align towards the sun for power. The instrument inside doesn't necessitate a thruster in order to prove mission success. The second one we're looking at using electro spray or pulse plasma thrusters. Applicability is to prove a novel way of satellite alignment/docking, so we have lots of orbital maneuvers. We could likely get away with using drag for the larger spans, but when we get really close and when we dock the two together, we obviously need a thruster. As for the alignment, we're going towards reaction wheels. A capstone at my university is trying to build ones because they're expensiveeeeee and I'd like to use our budget for some things that are much more difficult to make, like a star tracker. If not, then likely we'll head back towards magnetometers since we already know how to do it.
I work with ECR (very mildly). It is exactly how microwave ovens work (magentron) and big science experiments heat plasma (gyrotron). The systems involved have many components and everything is very big. I would guess that trying to make it small is the largest barrier. Designing, let alone manufacturing, a small gyrotron system is technically challenging. There are many rails running in the 10s of KV that you can’t just put within a few inches of each other without a fancy insulator.
It's great that some people won't even get the joke, for anyone who doesnt know he is talking about Valve's proposed Half-Life 3 game :> Also I'm honestly just trying to be helpful I promise
They should have said "like a fire extinguisher on a Wall-E", but that probably wouldn't have been understood by enough people. Wall-E's resting state is a cube.
I'm interested in a hybrid cold gas system utilizing an extra chamber and valve. The cold gas is released into the secondary valved chamber, there it is heated to increase pressure and then released through the nozzle. It's not going to get you from leo to gso but it should provide a significant manueverablility increase over a simple cold gas system with minor overhead. The pulses put out by such a system should provide well defined impulses for measuring/calculating/controlling movements. Surprisingly, the main constraint in such a system is the valves themselves. Some progress has been made with MEMS valve technology, but leakage is a huge issue with that approach and working versions are still pretty expensive. Magnetorque control is very interesting. I see this is usually done with coils, but I wonder if it has been done with a permanent magnet that would be rotated as needed. Also I wonder if it would be possible in at least a polar orbit to push/pull off of the earth's magnetic field to raise/lower orbit.
Could you guys do an episode about the South Atlantic Anomaly and Earth's shifting poles? Also, what are the potential implications for damage to our electronics/power grid during solar flares, in reference to a potential pole reversal and transition period?
CubeSats are regulated and must deorbit within a certain time frame. You also have to prove that when your vehicle deorbits everything will burn so no debris makes it through the atmosphere. We do have a space trash problem, but I think now people are starting to recognize we need to be good stewards of space.
A tablet or smart phone board would be enough "brains" for most small cubes. They have more processing power than the apollos and there is a large data base of applications already out there that could be adapted/rewritten.
Well... I'm sure we've already thought about it, but could solar sails could help? We could have it fold out when the cubesat wants to move and have it rotate around to allow it more control of its movement. What are the issues with this idea?
I wonder if you could use those ion engines in a sort of double configuration. Like som form of twin system. Maybe it would be effective on fighting inertia.
Could you use a chamber that is sealed or 3D printed around with some sort of laser that ablates a surface causing high pressure gas which can be vented as propulsion? Maybe more efficient
The propellants are used to adjust the position and facing of the satellite, you can't do that with something as uncontrollable and heavy like that, it'll just put your sat off its orbit
Will these new CubeSats have an end of life function where they propel themselves into the atmosphere to burn up, or are they just going to continue to float out there as part of the space junk heap?
@@essigautomat Graveyard orbits are above geosynchronous orbit (>40,000km). Usually not an option for low-Earth orbit satellites, as you'd need a huge change in speed (i.e. powerful propulsion). Those are usually de-orbited (i.e. crashed into Earth), while geosynchronous sats are moved higher, out of the way into graveyard orbits.
CubeSats are required to deorbit within a certain time limit. There is a number of years you are required to deorbit by, and I believe it depends on your altitude. Mine is requried to deorbit after 8 years. Though, if possible, it is requested that for those satellites with thrusters you use the remaining propellant to deorbit once your mission is complete. Another requirement is that all CubeSats must burn up upon reentry, so remnants don't fall to the ground but they don't remain in space either.
Most are so small that when their orbit degrades enough to no longer be useful for the mission, that the entire satellite burns up in the atmosphere. There's a lot of paperwork involved insuring it does this.
In ion propulsion, if the gas expels electrons, then what keeps the interior of the engine from becoming an unworkable mess of positively charged particles?
You mean reaction wheels? Only work for changing the way you're facing (attitude control), not moving around. You need propellant to e.g. push you away from the Earth to counteract orbital decay so you don't burn up in the atmosphere, or to get into a difderent orbit.
Thinking outside of the box basic explain a magnet attracts a projectile kinetic energy to move in that direction. No need for fuel. I did an experiment and it worked. A few minor adjustments maybe for microgravity. I have no degrees or higher education what do I know.
> I have no degrees or higher education And it shows 😜 You always need reaction mass (e.g. fuel) to move an object in orbit. The only way to get rid of that requirement is getting the momentum change done by external forces like solar wind (using a solar sail) or super strong lasers fired from Earth or the Moon (using a light sail). Magnets aren't magic - even though many people ask themselves how they f'ing work - and conservation of momentum still applies.
They're called magnetorquers/magnetometers and are pretty widely used for ADACS systems. I doubt you could get them to actually work as propulsion systems as is. I think someone above commented using a really long wire? I'm fairly certain deployables are regulated so I don't know exactly how that works, or what the length restriction is, so maybe you could get it long enough.
You missed the opportunity to say "like a fire extinguisher in the hands of a small mobile trash compactor" (Wall-E for those that don't get the reference).
Damn it, mass and volume aren't linearly related. Yeah it's true that you want to launch a physically smaller satellite; to reduce drag forces, or fill the payload bay with as many small satellites as possible. (to take advantages of the economies of scale) But a lighter satellite is not necessarily going to be physically smaller, especially where solar sails are involved.
How could you forget the MIT micro thrusters? I am not very computer literate but here is the story. From 2012: news.mit.edu/2012/microthrusters-could-propel-small-satellites-0817
I thought in space, objects will never lose their speed. So if you reach 100mph for example and turn off the engine you will continue to fly 100mph? Is this correct?
The technology existed and was in use since the 1970s. Practical designs were developed in Soviet Union, though, so it took until the collapse of the SU in 1991 and the subsequent exchange of experts and knowledge to make them available in the West. Add to that the fact that the satellite business is rather conservative, and so it took a while for electric propulsion to see widespread adoption. Another factor for small sats and CubeSats is power requirements. Solar cells have seen a dramatic reduction in price over the last two decades so the 200W or so required by a small Hall Effect thruster became affordable to put on a tiny satellite.
Why they're not using light propulsion? Like light E.M radiation engine or whatever(Not solar sails) theoretically they could go infinitely as long as they could have power.
Too little absolute thrust, unfortunately. Photons have no mass, so they carry almost no momentum to push you off (conservation of momentum!). That's why ion engines use heavy elements like xenon.
@@nibblrrr7124 yeah but there would be some amount of thrust which would be almost infinite. Would it be efficient ? I mean probably you don't need that much thrust for cubesat.
Are cube sats viable at all outside Earths gravity well ? I mean what with communications, in Earths gravity well everything is relatively close but farther away you have to have large dish for communications as far as i know. Imho someone should put a few cheap communication satelites at lagrange points through solar system to relay communications and make cube sats viable for farther than Earth. I mean then a university can gather money and send their cube sat to Saturn for example ( yes it will reach in 10ish years but its good bang for buck..)...
In theory, sure. But, you'd need to find somebody willing to launch your satellite full of explosives. No commercial launcher would give you a ride. But also, just ramming something at orbital speeds is generally going to be an absolutely massive impact. The extra destruction from the explosives would probably be negligible in most cases. A slow, safe, perfectly matched velocity orbital rendezvous is a very hard thing to do.
Why not just make them a little bigger? Why arbitrarily stick with 10 cm? I’m no engineer but it seems like there would be an easy way to redesign and fix any issues.
CubeSats are built in U's so you can stack them. For example, I just finished work on a 3U. The whole point of the Cubesat was to reduce size. It's expensive to throw things into space, so the smaller you can make your mission, the better. I mean, if you can fit an instrument into a 3U, why build a whole large system? It's more about efficiency than anything. And, with larger missions, you can rideshare... take up the extra space on the rocket. It works out for all parties involved if you can meet that space limit. Like yeah larger satellites exist, but that's not really the point.
Makes sense. What’s the smallest one could make a rocket booster is all I was thinking? lol never mind haha thanks for the info 😝😊 that’s really cool that you build them
