11 ms·
I don't want to minimize the geopolitical issue here but wanted to ask about microsatellites and the ISS. How do you put the satellite onto its intended orbit,
by filereaper 6y ago
I don't want to minimize the geopolitical issue here but wanted to ask about microsatellites and the ISS.
How do you put the satellite onto its intended orbit, like are only satellites intended with a polar orbit capable of this approach?
Do you need booster rockets to get in the right orbit?
Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
This is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit.
- mcountryman 6y agoI had to picture someone opening a window and throwing it into orbit haha
- genera1 6y agoIt's not that far off from the truth
- Steltek 6y agoIt's actually pretty cool. They have a space torpedo launcher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoracks_CubeSat_Deployer#/media/File:NanoRacksCubeSatLaunch_ISS038-E-056389.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoracks_CubeSat_Deployer#/me... What I haven't figured out is how they get the sats far enough away from the ISS orbit with only one push.
- genera1 6y agoThere are even manual deployments https://youtu.be/-hutA7In7GA https://youtu.be/-hutA7In7GA
- bagels 6y agoIf you give it a few cm/s velocity, the separation distance grows over time.
- dylan604 6y agoRelativity. At the moments before launch, the ISS and satellite are moving at the same speed. The launch gives extra velocity (positive delta-v??) which ever so slightly due to mass differences gives a tiny push against the ISS. So the satellite continues to pull away with its increase in velocity. See Newton's first law of motion. However, after launch, the small satellite usually has no ability to course correct, and its orbit slowly decays to friction with the thin atmosphere. Meanwhile, ISS continues to course correct.
- pilsetnieks 6y agoA minor nitpick but it's not relativity (as in Einstein's relativity,) it's just relative velocity. The launch imparts velocity on the satellite but that velocity difference doesn't mean it flies in formation with the ISS a few hundred meters or a few kilometers apart. If they were launched in the direction the ISS is going (positive delta-v), that extra velocity means a higher orbit; if they're launched backwards (negative delta-v), it'll be a lower orbit. If it's launched sideways, it's either higher, lower, or same depending on delta-v but a different inclination (angle to the equator.) I couldn't quickly find where exactly the deployer is located but I'm guessing it's aft because it's the same module the ISS launches it's trash out of now (the Bishop airlock,) and I'm guessing they wouldn't launch anything in a fast decaying slightly higher orbit just to get hit by it a few cycles later. The whole thing it's pretty cool, and it's quite new, it was installed only 3 months ago.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoWouldn’t sideways launch give an orbit that sometimes overlap with the original orbit or is there some maths that makes sure that never happens?
- pilsetnieks 6y agoYes, twice every cycle, just at an angle, assuming all other orbital parameters remain the same. That's also why no one sane would ever do it.
- enriquto 6y ago> What I haven't figured out is how they get the sats far enough away from the ISS orbit with only one push. What I don't understand here is how do they avoid the satellite hitting back the ISS? Once they are separated and non-propulsed, both orbits are elliptical with at least one point of intersection, and stay like that forever. If they have different period, it seems that the ISS and the cubesat might become arbitrarily closer in the future.
- dylan604 6y agoGreat, so they're essentially littering. I hope the Space Force Police pull them over to issue a citation. At least, this will burn up in the atmo rather than in a water system, or do they turn themselves into microparticles ultimately landing in the oceans? They really are litter
- bagels 6y agoIt's low orbit ~400km, the lifetime of these things is measured in weeks or months.
- jerf 6y agoAnd the Earth picks up about 40,000 tons of space dust per year. We've got a lot of work to do before our space "littering" can even dream of matching that level... and that's just a coincidental level that nature happens to have, not some sort of threshold for "real harm", which I'd guess to be multiple orders of magnitude higher.
- dylan604 6y agoSo do McDonalds wrappers is my point.
- ekimekim 6y agohttps://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits/cubesat https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits... Sounds like in most cases the satellites don't have any propulsion of their own, and are "ejected" onto their orbit from the ISS. Put simply, they get thrown out. I'm sure some checks are done of the orbital mechanics to avoid any risk of a later collission, but keep in mind that the ISS makes frequent course corrections to stay in orbit, and at this low of an orbit drag is also a factor, so simply being a smaller craft will cause different forces to push you onto a different path. Obviously this means you have very little choice in your orbit, but for many small satellites this isn't a concern. EDIT: To answer your "use it as a garage" point, the answer is that it's way too impractical. In orbital mechanics, drifting apart from something is far easier than getting closer to it, and space is really, really big. Plus keep in mind that you need to not only be in the same place at the same time, but you also need to be moving at the same speed (relative velocities in LEO can quickly reach the order of kilometers per second).
- filereaper 6y agoI imagined deploying a net of some sort to get close but not extremely close. But I guess the high velocities mean you need a really strong and light net and the rapid deceleration might damage the satellite anyway.
- jiofih 6y agoThe ISS orbits at 400km altitude and 27000km/h, while many small satellites will orbit lower - I suppose this is what makes it possible to “drop” a non-propulsive satellite from the ISS like the one in the article. As their orbit decays, they would actually need tons of fuel to accelerate and raise their orbit to reach the station, it’s totally impractical. EDIT: not geostationary
- viklove 6y agoThat doesn't make any sense. If you want to orbit at a lower speed, you need to increase your altitude. Geostationary orbit is at 35,000+ km, while the ISS orbits at ~400 km.
- Voloskaya 6y agoIt's fairly common nowadays. Companies like Nanoracks [1] specialize in this. Obviously this can only be done for cubesats. They are put into orbit simply by being ejected at the right angle and speed from the ISS. [1]: https://nanoracks.com/products/iss-deployment/ https://nanoracks.com/products/iss-deployment/
- filereaper 6y agoWow, this is super interesting. I didn't realize launching satellites had become so turnkey now where you don't have all the friction of dealing with NASA or any large space agency. Nanoracks has an interesting list of customers, like Adidas and Double-Tree by Hilton?!
- Rebelgecko 6y agoNanoracks does commercial things on the ISS other than cubesat launches. IIRC the Doubletree thing was they sent up an oven and had an astronaut bake cookies using their recipe
- GordonS 6y agoPart of me is impressed by the economics of it (I had no idea such things were so affordable), and the rest of me is embarrassed by the almost flippant use of space tech...
- simonh 6y agoI think Astronauts deserve the occasional freshly baked cookie too. Food preparation in space is arguably a serious business.
- nickik 6y agoCheckout out: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ Probably the cheapest way to launch things. However, SpaceX has no interest in dealing with everybody that wants to launch a cubsat so you have to go to an integrator.
- resist_futility 6y agoLooks like they are launched from a specialty module on the ISS with only a spring https://iss.jaxa.jp/en/kiboexp/jssod/ https://iss.jaxa.jp/en/kiboexp/jssod/
- nickik 6y agoNow its done with the Nanoracks Airlock: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Expedition_64_-_Status_with_the_new_NanoRacks_Bishop_airlock.png/1200px-Expedition_64_-_Status_with_the_new_NanoRacks_Bishop_airlock.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Ex...
- stetrain 6y agoThis really only works if your satellite is very small and you are okay with being in roughly the same orbit as the ISS. It is certainly not the norm for satellite launches, but if your mission meets the parameters and there is available space on a cargo supply that's already going to the ISS, you can potentially get a cheaper ride by going that route. As far as I know the ISS doesn't have any facilities for "bringing in" a larger satellite or repairing it. NASA is pretty protective of the ISS and objects approaching it have to follow very particular procedures and be certified for the process (Dragon, Cygnus, etc.). Also most satellites aren't in an orbit similar to the ISS. Things usually either get launched equitorially (east), polar (north/south), or are are much higher altitude in geostationary orbit. The ISS has a peculiar orbital inclination to make it more accessible to both US and Russian launch sites.
- Animats 6y agoThis is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit. It's a commercial service, from Nanoracks.[1] They load cubesats into a container, have them shipped to the ISS, and the satellites are "launched" with a spring. So they're in roughly the same orbit as the ISS. The price just went way up. NASA raised their price on transport to the Space Station from $3,000 per kilogram to $20,000 per kilogram. They also raised the astronaut labor rate to $130,000/hour. NASA was subsidizing the ISS launch scheme. So future cubesats will probably be launched from a Falcon 9 using one of Space-X's resellers. [1] https://nanoracks.com/products/iss-deployment/ https://nanoracks.com/products/iss-deployment/ [2] http://parabolicarc.com/2021/03/05/nasa-jacks-up-iss-commercial-prices-neglects-to-tell-users/ http://parabolicarc.com/2021/03/05/nasa-jacks-up-iss-commerc...
- Defenestresque 6y agoInteresting article. As you mentioned, NASA is justifying the >6x price increase with: >In announcing the policy change, NASA said it had previously subsidized transportation to and from the station in order to foster the development of commercial space applications. >“Since making these opportunities available, there has been a growing demand for commercial and marketing activities from both traditional aerospace companies and from novel industries, demonstrating the benefits of the space station to help catalyze and expand space exploration markets and the low-Earth orbit economy,” the space agency said. “As a result, NASA has updated its pricing policy for commercial activities conducted on the station to reflect full reimbursement for the value of NASA resources.” While I don't have any reason not to take this explanation at face value, I am curious about the timing. Did they just have too many potential customers to justify subsidizing the cost? I was also surprised to see a "trash disposal" line item in the price catalog. It doesn't sound like ISS-generated waste. Does anyone know if this is literally people paying thousands of dollars per kg to transport cargo to space in order to dispose it by burning it up on re-entry? What could justify such a cost? Are there examples? What kind of restrictions on items are there? (Perhaps I should just Google this myself! :)
- Goronmon 6y ago
- outworlder 6y agoThey have to be 'roughly' in the same orbit as the ISS. You can go up or down. You would't really do any inclination changes (if you, say, wanted an equatorial orbit) as there's no way a microsat would have enough fuel. Better to launch in the correct inclination. > Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites? Moving the whole station doesn't really make sense. Even a vehicle would burn a lot of fuel, and would only really work, once again, in the same (or close to the same) inclination. Inclination changes are so expensive that there was at least one case where an operator sent a satellite all the way to the Moon and back, because it cost less fuel that way.
- shadowgovt 6y ago> Inclination changes are so expensive that there was at least one case where an operator sent a satellite all the way to the Moon and back, because it cost less fuel that way. To get a good rule-of-thumb for this in your brain, you can think of it in terms of vector mathematics. Consider a circular orbit. Now consider two vectors: one in the direction of that orbit, one perpendicular to it. A naive inclination change from 0 degrees to 90 degrees, with no other change to the orbit's dynamics (i.e. same eccentricity, same periapsis / apoapsis), require the velocity to change from parallel to the first vector to parallel to the second, at the same magnitude. That's a total change of SQRT(2 * starting_velocity^2) ~= 1.4 * starting velocity. If we consider a velocity that is LEO (about 7.8 km/s), our total velocity change would have to be about 10.92 km/s. Putting a satellite into LEO from Earth's surface only costs between 9 and 10 km/s from gravity loss, steering, and wind resistance. Earth is a deceptively expensive gravity well to be doing inclination change maneuvers in.
- rtkwe 6y ago> This is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit. Sometimes CubeSats will launch as ride-alongs on the rocket itself (it's more common on rockets not already going to the ISS) and others are designed to be launched from the ISS itself depending on how they're being paid for. In either case they'll wind up in the roughly 51 degree inclination of the ISS. > Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites? They can't really capture satellites because very few actually orbit at that level it's mostly the kind of short term cube sats that they launch out not larger satellites. Those live in higher orbits so getting to them to fix is not a small task. Another big hurdle is the orbital inclination changing that is extremely expensive to do, basically everything is placed into it's final orbital inclination at launch because of the fuel requirements to change it once you're in orbit. It's why the ISS is at such a high inclination to begin with, so that it's easier to get to from Baikonur where Russia launches it's vehicles from.