KickSat: A Crowd-Funded Mission to Demonstrate the World's Smallest Spacecraft - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

KickSat: A Crowd-Funded Mission to Demonstrate the World’s Smallest Spacecraft

Zac Manchester, Mason Peck, and Andrew Filo
Conference Paper, Proceedings of AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites, August, 2013
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Abstract

Thanks to rapid advances made in the semiconductor industry, it is now possible to integrate most of the features of a traditional spacecraft onto a chip-scale device. The Sprite ChipSat, in development at Cornell since 2008, is an example of such a device. The KickSat mission, scheduled for launch in late 2013, will deploy 128 Sprites in low Earth orbit to test their survivability and demonstrate their code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system. The Sprites are expected to remain in orbit for several days while downlinking telemetry to ground stations before reentry. KickSat has been partially funded by over 300 backers through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. Reference designs for the Sprites, along with a low-cost ground station receiver, are being made available under an open-source license.

BibTeX

@conference{Manchester-2013-122130,
author = {Zac Manchester and Mason Peck and Andrew Filo},
title = {KickSat: A Crowd-Funded Mission to Demonstrate the World's Smallest Spacecraft},
booktitle = {Proceedings of AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites},
year = {2013},
month = {August},
}
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