A SmallSat is a vaguely defined concept. Pretty much anything below 250 kg can be called as a SmallSat. These can be further classified as MicroSat, MiniSat, NanoSat, and PicoSat, although the sizes don't scale by three orders. For example, a NanoSat is essentially anything under 30 kg. A CubeSat, on the other hand, is by definition a 10 cm cube with a total mass less than or equal to 1.33 kg. The exponential increase in CubeSat interest in its nearly two decade-long existence can be attributed to a few primary factors. The CubeSat design is a well-defined standard, allowing universities to quickly implement a CubeSat program and integrate it into its curriculum. Having a standardized launch platform, called a P-POD, allows the CubeSat community to request for launch opportunities, typically as secondary payloads on commercial flights, long before the internal design of any CubeSat is finished. And CubeSats can be stacked and arranged in predefined configurations known as 1U, 1.5U, 2U, 3U, 6U, 12U and 24U.
NASA and NSF have both started research programs that fund CubeSat missions for scientific objectives. Dr. Barjatya was funded as an instrument PI on the NSF DICE mission and has been recently funded on the NASA LLITED mission. Both of these are dual 1.5U CubeSat missions.
On the SmallSat front, Dr. Barjatya has been funded as an Instrument PI providing a Langmuir Probe suite to the ESCAPADE mission. This is a NASA SIMPLEX mission to fly two small satellites to Mars.
Brief introductions and a few pictures for each of these missions is provided in subpages.
NASA and NSF have both started research programs that fund CubeSat missions for scientific objectives. Dr. Barjatya was funded as an instrument PI on the NSF DICE mission and has been recently funded on the NASA LLITED mission. Both of these are dual 1.5U CubeSat missions.
On the SmallSat front, Dr. Barjatya has been funded as an Instrument PI providing a Langmuir Probe suite to the ESCAPADE mission. This is a NASA SIMPLEX mission to fly two small satellites to Mars.
Brief introductions and a few pictures for each of these missions is provided in subpages.
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