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As a software developer, the thing I love about the cubesat concept is the presumably reduced iteration time. The idea of waiting for years only to find out som

As a software developer, the thing I love about the cubesat concept is the presumably reduced iteration time. The idea of waiting for years only to find out something went wrong once the satellite is in orbit seems absurd (sorry, GOES-17). That said, isn't the whole concept of cubesats tied to the idea that they're not in a geostationary orbit? There's something to be said for the simplicity of "point at this spot in your section of sky and receive data". I suppose now is a good time for me to look into how to get data from a cubesat fleet.

geuis 8y ago
If you're curious about this, check out Planet Lab's. http://planet.com/ http://planet.com/ They have a fleet of almost 200 cubesats now, in addition to higher resolution satellites from TerraBella. There's an api that you should be able to experiment with.
- redavni 8y ago
  Sadly, their time resolution (at least at the free tier) is awful. Would be quite an interesting challenge to interpolate a large fleet of cubesat's imagery into decent time resolution (the goes satellites regularly do 30 sec time resolution ) over a large geographic area. edit: The cube sats in the study are only microwave as well, which are compared to the noaa-20 series which arent the correct comparison really.These cubesats would fit in better with the GPM constellation for which global coverage is pretty good, but more coverage would be good. The biggest problem as mentioned is calibration. Accuracy of the dataset over long periods of time is Paramount.
milesokeefe 8y ago
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-17#Malfunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-17#Malfunction
pokemongoaway 8y ago
"The bottom line is that this tiny satellite collected data that is as good as the data from a billion-dollar government satellite." -- It is strange that this doesn't trigger anyone else's alarm bells. Did anyone even care to show the exact difference in data between these two sources? Where is the evidence there is a significant figure accuracy difference?

geuis 8y ago

If you're curious about this, check out Planet Lab's. http://planet.com/ http://planet.com/ They have a fleet of almost 200 cubesats now, in addition to higher resolution satellites from TerraBella. There's an api that you should be able to experiment with.

redavni 8y ago
Sadly, their time resolution (at least at the free tier) is awful. Would be quite an interesting challenge to interpolate a large fleet of cubesat's imagery into decent time resolution (the goes satellites regularly do 30 sec time resolution ) over a large geographic area. edit: The cube sats in the study are only microwave as well, which are compared to the noaa-20 series which arent the correct comparison really.These cubesats would fit in better with the GPM constellation for which global coverage is pretty good, but more coverage would be good. The biggest problem as mentioned is calibration. Accuracy of the dataset over long periods of time is Paramount.

milesokeefe 8y ago

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-17#Malfunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-17#Malfunction

pokemongoaway 8y ago

"The bottom line is that this tiny satellite collected data that is as good as the data from a billion-dollar government satellite." -- It is strange that this doesn't trigger anyone else's alarm bells. Did anyone even care to show the exact difference in data between these two sources? Where is the evidence there is a significant figure accuracy difference?