Engineering the World’s Smallest Spacecraft

Abstract:  The aerospace industry has experienced a dramatic shift over the last decade: Flying a spacecraft has gone from something only government agencies and large corporations could afford to something universities and small startups can accomplish on a shoestring budget. The main driver of this revolution has been the dramatic decrease in the size, weight, and power consumption of countless spacecraft components driven by the scaling of Moore’s law. However, pushing the boundaries of spacecraft size and cost often demands a fundamental re-thinking of how we build these systems, from energy harvesting to sensing and actuation. This talk will focus on recent missions flown by the Robotic Exploration Lab – including KickSat-2, which deployed the four-gram Sprite spacecraft; V-R3x, which demonstrated mesh networking between three CubeSats; and PY4, which launched on March 4 and is demonstrating low-cost attitude control, formation flying, and radio navigation capabilities on a group of four two-kilogram satellites.