Some “smallsats” watch for illegal shipping activities; yet more are built to service other satellites in orbit
a group of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin launched an unusual satellite. At a time when most of the machinery in orbit weighed thousands of kilograms,was a petite 45kg. A box that measured 32cm on each side, it carried three video cameras, the idea being to test whether such a titchy spacecraft could capture useful imagery of Earth. The researchers cited low mass, and the resultant low costs, as the benefits of such comparatively tiny satellites.
Much of the recent attention has focused on the internet-connection constellations in low Earth orbit proposed by SpaceX and OneWeb. These have long been planned, and the billions of dollars required to install them are feeding the entire market. Payam Banazadeh, the boss of Capella Space, a startup based in San Francisco and founded in 2016, says his firm will use smallsats to work similar magic. Capella’s satellites will use radio waves, rather than light, to create images of the surface of the Earth. Mr Banazadeh says that his smallsats will be able to measure the volume of oil-storage tanks, for example, which are often open-topped to avoid fire risks, simply by pinging a radar beam into them.
The firm has competition from Amazon, which just announced its own backbone service for data out of orbit and into its data centres, calledGround Station. Capella is an early customer of the service, which uses radio waves rather than lasers to get data down from orbit.
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