Hi Dan
Many thanks for the link. It certainly makes interesting reading...at the bottom of his database is a further link to his 2016 presentation https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/swartwout/swartwout_cubesat_workshop_2016... that you mention.
Can we, collectively, come up with a better name than "Hobbyists" that he shows in slide 3?
73
Graham G3VZV
-----Original Message----- From: Daniel Schultz Sent: Friday, June 17, 2016 2:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Only Half of the CubeSats Deployed into Space Work
I just attended a talk on Tuesday by professor Michael Swartwout of Saint Louis University. He maintains a database of all known Cubesats at: https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/swartwout/home/cubesat-database
According to his most recent data, about 25% of recent Cubesats are dead on arrival in orbit, and another 12% fail early in the mission. 50% of Cubesats are classified as fully or partially successful. He attributes this mostly to inexperienced organizations building their first satellite with little understanding of the space environment and little or no environmental testing before launch. A certain amount of first timer "we know everything" arrogance also factors into that statistic. Satellites in space definitely don't work the same as satellites on the workbench. Many of these "one and done" organizations quit building satellites after their first failure, those organizations that launch multiple Cubesats have much better success rates. Experience does count for something.
Even for tiny little Cubesats, there is a set of "best practices" that you need to pay attention to when building your satellite. If it is your organization's first satellite, you need to be mindful of what you don't know and try to learn from the experience of others.
Slides from an earlier presentation by Professor Swartwout are at: http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/eeesmallmissions/talks/11%20-%20THU/1300%20-%...
I expect that this year's presentation will be posted online in a few days.
Dan Schultz N8FGV
------------Original Message------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:54:05 +0000 (UTC) From: M5AKA [email protected] To: AMSAT BB [email protected] Subject: [amsat-bb] "Only Half of the CubeSats Deployed into Space Work" Message-ID: [email protected] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
ARRL story quotes NASA engineer Joe Pellegrino as saying "Only Half of the CubeSats Deployed into Space Work" - is the failure rate really that high?http://www.arrl.org/news/view/stmsat-1-youngsters-told-only-half-of-the-cub esats-deployed-into-space-work
I've certainly noticed that a number of ISS deployed CubeSats using amateur frequencies which were subject to delays in the initial launch and then more delays before actual deployment have failed but it certainly didn't seem to be as high as 50%
But most ISS CubeSat deployments are not on amateur frequencies e.g. over 100 Planet Labs Dove CubeSats have been deployed. Was the NASA engineer saying that half of Planet Labs satellites failed to work?
73 Trevor M5AKA
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