There's a report up on Universe Today about plans from Goddard Space Flight Centre (GSFC) to use Cubesats as an Astronomy platform, giving them a low cost solar coronagraph platform to demonstrate new technologies.
GSFC aerospace engineers, led by Neerav Shah, don’t want to go far, they just want to look at things far away using two cubesats. Their design will use one as a telescope – some optics and a good detector –and the other cubesat will stand off about 20 meters, as they plan, and function as a coronagraph. The coronagraph cubesat will function as a sun mask, an occulting disk to block out the bright rays from the surface of the Sun so that the cubesat telescope can look with high resolution at the corona and the edge of the Sun. To these engineers, the challenge is keeping the two cubesats accurately aligned and pointing at their target.
The NASA Press Release has more information on the mission objectives and development plans.
With support from Goddard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program, the team plans to develop a prototype system — the so-called Virtual Telescope Alignment System (VTAS) — and subject it to a series of rigorous ground demonstrations.
The team's ultimate goal is to demonstrate VTAS on two CubeSats, relatively low-cost platforms that offer less-risky opportunities to test and demonstrate new technologies. Once demonstrated, Shah and his team believe the technology then could be ripe for infusion into a dual-spacecraft mission.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @07:04AM
now if only NASA had a space program to launch them
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday October 28 2014, @09:14AM
Not to be nitpicking, but should't the coronagraph be more like a SphereSat?
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:21AM
Am not sure about the value of research from using Cube Sats, but, there will be a definite increase in space debris unless they plan to de-orbit all obsolete Cube Sats.
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:47AM
Good point, TFA mentions the CubeSats are sent "on a brief space voyage to low-earth orbit (LEO)". So I guess they will not enter a stable orbit (due to atmospheric drag) and will eventually come down by themselves.
(Score: 2) by DrMag on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:59PM
There's a huge potential value in CubeSats for research, but there are two problems to be tackled before they can really become the tools we need: pointing and propulsion. There's been a lot of work so far on the pointing problem, and these guys, if successful, will really push that forward given the accuracy needed to pull off what they're doing.
The propulsion problem is a miniaturization issue--we can't put useful conventional propulsion systems on these because there's just not enough room for the fuel in such a small volume without sacrificing the instruments giving us a reason to get up there. If we can figure that problem out, though, then the de-orbiting issue is solved completely.
Once we get the technology issues solved, there's so much we can do with CubeSats. Space is big.. REALLY big. Many studies could greatly benefit from having a large number of platforms out there working together to take measurements, and CubeSats make that possible at reasonable costs.
(Score: 1) by martyb on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:09PM
I, for one, am hoping they can get this to work out.
The Hubble Space Telescope [wikipedia.org] has provided us with a tremendous amount of knowledge about our universe. It is, however, limited by its main mirror's size of 2.4m (7 feet 10 inches).
I would think it a tremendous boon to science if one or more additional "Hubble" telescopes could be sent up. It would increase the amount of independent observing time that is available. (Think of the ultra deep view image that revealed hundreds of galaxies in an otherwise dark-appearing sector of space thanks to long-term observation.) Now imagine if multiple space-based hubble-class telescopes could be joined together to increase the light-gathering capability over a period of time.
Separately, if these were in orbit on opposite sides of the earth, then stereoscopic images could be made of bodies in our solar system and further details elucidated from the observations.
That said, I am not an astronomer, so please respond and correct any errors!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:30PM