Podcaster: Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay
Title: Astronomy Cast: Ep. 757: CubeSats
Organization: Astronomy Cast
Link: http://www.astronomycast.com
Description: Streamed live on May 19, 2025.
Computers are getting smaller, faster and more capable, which has enabled an entirely mew class of satellites: CubeSats. A mission small enough that you can hold it in your hands, and yet powerful enough to even travel to other planets and send messages home.
Every year, our electronics seem to get smaller and more powerful, with today’s smart watches being more fully featured than the computers Pamela and Fraser had as little kids. These tiny processors, sensors, and transmitters are allowing tiny satellites with powerful functionality, and today we take a look at how this is changing space exploration.
Bio: Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today and Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest. They team up to do Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos
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Transcript:
[Fraser Cain]
AstronomyCast, Episode 757, CubeSats. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of Universe Today.
With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of Cosmos Quest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I am doing well, and I want to thank all of you out there who reached out to see if I was okay after all of the tornadoes that went through the St. Louis area.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, it was buzzing on my news, I’m like, Pamela, are you alright?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, and a whole bunch of you that I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting before reached out to check on me, and everything in my town is completely okay. There was a radar-confirmed tornado that went over where I live, but didn’t touch down. So, our power wasn’t so good, but everything else was fine, and this is just another one of the signs of spring, along with I still have poison ivy, so tornadoes, poison ivy, and we had the first murdered groundhog of the season.
This is the part of spring I do not like.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, people always send me the RUOKs for the earthquakes that happen in my area, but the problem is, mine don’t come with seasons, so I can’t go, oh, summer’s here, it’s earthquake time. No, they just happen randomly, but yeah, I’m really glad you guys are safe, and I’m sorry about your groundhog, and I’m sorry about your poison ivy, that stuff sucks.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, yeah, hopefully we will be past this time of year when there are dumb baby groundhogs everywhere, and we now know, it was the very first day that they came out of the burrow, and now I know, they’re here, and the dogs cannot go out without oversight.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, yeah. Computers are getting smaller, faster, and more capable, which has enabled an entirely new class of satellites, CubeSats, a mission small enough that you could hold it in your hands and yet powerful enough to even travel to other planets and send messages home, and we will talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break. And we’re back.
Alright, CubeSats. Now, I mean, this is a unfolding story that has been happening for a couple of decades at this point, but it’s still pretty amazing how many people are building CubeSats, what they’re capable of, how small they are, how inexpensive they are, and just what they’re capable of accomplishing. So where do you want to start in our conversation about CubeSats?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I think the best thing to do is to point out that the smartwatches so many of us have are like as powerful as the Apple computer I had when I was a little child. And when you go from something that was like arm-sized to something that is watch-sized in that number of decades, it allows the satellite technology to also advance. And so the definition of a CubeSat is something that is made out of units of cubes that are 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters, which is like an oversized Rubik’s cube in size.
So think of a chunky Rubik’s cube, and that’s the size of these satellites. And they don’t get launched on their own. They’re always secondary to something, which means that they’re cheap to make because they’re tiny and they’re cheap to launch because they’re ride shares.
[Fraser Cain]
OK, so let’s talk about that size first. So 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. I don’t know, was that three inches for the Imperial people out there?
So that is one U, right? Yes. Yes.
OK. And so then you will measure your CubeSat in the number of U’s that are in it. So give me a sense of how big, like a proper mission.
There aren’t many one U CubeSats out there, although I think they do exist.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
There’s actually lots of low Earth orbit, one unit CubeSats, and that size is the size when they’re folded up and packed up to go. So for instance, there’s a lot of problems with figuring out how to do propulsion on these things that we’ll get to. And so if you happen to have a solar sail on your one unit CubeSat, that solar sail is clearly not going to be just 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Right. It’s going to deploy and then be a larger sail.
Yeah. Yeah. Or antenna or solar panels, like all kinds of things flip out of these little guys once they’re in space.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So the the multi-planetary missions that I’m finding, which is like something we do now, those are typically six unit CubeSats. So you take six of these 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter objects and plop them together in the configuration that works best for your mission. And then you can go and like fly to the asteroid belt, fly to Mars.
[Fraser Cain]
Yes. And these are things we’re doing. And what kinds of of like capabilities do these things have?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So the first thing they need to be able to do because of the insane ways in which they’re launched, which can include being flung out by a human being, thrown off the International Space Station. This is a they literally yeet.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. They’ve got like a bag of them and they’re just hucking them off the station, which is amazing.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s awesome. So it turns out in the process of yeeting CubeSats, sometimes they collide with each other. They get these random rotations set up.
So they need to be able to stabilize themselves for a lot of purposes. There are satellites that have like omnidirectional antenna and they’re not doing anything particularly needing to be pointed in a given direction. But for the majority of these suckers.
[Fraser Cain]
Yep.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
They want to be able to orient themselves, right? So they do have reaction wheels. They do have various ways of using magnets and thrust.
And so you have a thrust system and you have an orientation system and a communication system. Those are basically the three things all of these suckers are going to have.
[Fraser Cain]
And for the ones that are in low Earth orbit, like there are some really elegant solutions for this kind of problem. Because you said magnets like you can use you can run electricity along a wire and that will cause the thing to align itself with the Earth’s magnetic field.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Very slowly.
[Fraser Cain]
Very slowly.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
But it works. Fine.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And it doesn’t require very much energy at all. And then you’ve and then you’re lined up.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
These are not what you want to use if you’re impatient and want to do anything quickly.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. If you always just want to be pointing down or you always want to be pointing up, right? As opposed to, I want to look at this target, look at that target, look at this target.
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And they can have reaction wheels. So where it can take time is if you just like get something off the ISS and it hits something else and it’s like tumbling wildly. It can take a hot minute to use.
They can actually max out the reaction wheels trying to get these things reoriented the way they want. So once you get them oriented, though, they’re low mass there, you can maneuver them. There’s been some cool uses of, of using them to, to image Earth.
I mean, if you think about what your phone is capable of doing and it’s way smaller than a CubeSat stick, a phone like, and they actually use a lot of cell phone technology on these things.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Cell phone cameras, accelerometers, memory systems, CPUs, Snapdragons, all this kind of stuff finds its way into these CubeSats.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. It’s, it gets commercially developed and then tested and CubeSats gets certified as space hardware this way. The only, so, so getting them lined up isn’t too huge a deal where they really suffer though is in the propulsion department.
And this is simply because there’s a whole lot of restrictions launching them where they’re not allowed to be pressurized over 1.5 atmospheres. And if you think about wanting to chunk them full of fuel in a little tiny canister, you’re not going to be able to do that. You can only have so much potentially explosive chemical fuel on board.
And the reason for all these restrictions is they are not the primary passenger on anything they’re launching on. And including a small, somewhat explosive bundle that can take out your main satellite is, is not something any rocket company is going to do.
[Fraser Cain]
You can hitchhike as long as you’re not a bomb.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Right. Exactly.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Okay. So they, they have a method, but they will have propulsion.
So they use like little compressed gas methods, ion engines.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Hall effect engines. One of the cooler things that I was reading about is they will use a sail that is not exactly a solar sail in the normal sense. It is a sail that has a electric field on it.
So it is interacting with protons off the sun. So it’s just a slightly different way of doing a sail, but it’s considered electric propulsion.
[Fraser Cain]
It’s a mag sail.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, exactly.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And electric sails. Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And, and so you have electric sails, ion engines, Hall effect engines. And then of course, solar sails is going to be the way of the future.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately.
So there was one that was launched on with the Artemis one mission.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. There was a whole bunch of CubeSats.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And one of them though was a, was an asteroid exploring solar sail mission packed into a CubeSat and unfortunately it failed, but it would have been an amazing test of this, of this technology because it would, it would have had to use its solar sail to get itself all the way to this asteroid that it was going to be exploring. And unfortunately it failed and NASA’s moving on with their next solar sail.
But still that’s the, that’s the future that could have been. All right. We’re going to continue this conversation, but it is time for another break and we’re back.
All right. So we’ve talked about propulsion. Let’s talk about, you know, some of the other core functionality that this, you know, the CubeSat is going to require before we get into payloads.
Cause that’s like the best part is the, is the actual payload. But I guess we need some kind of processing. We need a communication system.
So what have we got for there?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
They tend to use omni directional antenna. They’re, they’re usually limited to just two Watts, which makes that a really horrifying thing to think about. Your local radio station is in the thousands of Watts and giant antennas and you still can no longer get it with your car radio when you drive too many miles.
Well these little big Rubik’s cube size flying objects that are hundreds of miles above the earth to multiple astronomical units away from the earth in their smallest form have two Watt antenna.
[Fraser Cain]
That’s one of the great sadnesses about this process is you would be amazed how inexpensive it is to build and launch one of these, 100,000 per unit normally, including launch, but people are even bringing those costs down, but you need a way to be able to communicate with it. So that doesn’t include giant radio dish or antenna array that allows you to communicate with your CubeSat when it’s flying overhead in under perfect conditions and you can get just a, you know, kilobits per second from this radio system to be able to pull your data off your thing. So you might be, you might’ve put a 4k amazing camera that’s capable of recording this beautiful video of the earth at 60 frames a second, but you can’t get that data off of the thing.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
No, no, you cannot, but multiple unit ones have more power so they can have stronger antennas. Otherwise we couldn’t communicate with them at multiple AUs. And there’s interesting plans to start doing things like inflatable antenna dishes.
So instead of just having your little squiggly antenna sticking out, they’re looking at systems and this was being developed at the jet propulsion lab, may they not murder this project, where it comes out and then just inflates into this big, gorgeous antenna. And so little things like this, if you’ve ever read about like using a Pringles can to increase the power of your home wifi, this is the space-based version of a Pringles can. It’s just inflatable so that you can have it be tiny on launch.
[Fraser Cain]
And with the rise of satellite mega constellations that are allowing us to communicate from anywhere on earth, there’s a sort of a new layer of communication between these CubeSats and things like Starlink or Kuiper or things like that. So what had been one of the largest issues, how are you going to get data off this thing, is starting to be solved by this infrastructure. And I think we’re going to see a time where if you launch a CubeSat, you will pay a service that you can just pay to retransmit your data through these various satellite networks.
And now suddenly that communication requirement becomes a lot easier because there’s this infrastructure. Let’s talk about power.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. So they’re for the most part using solar power, solar power with batteries. It’s what you do.
And so you are again limited by your ability to do origami. This is the way space goes. You origami your solar sails, you origami your solar panels, you origami your antennae.
And then the thing that was a whole bunch of 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter cubes turns into like amazing looking satellite. Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Some kind of transformer.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I love it.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
They need to do more videos of like what this process looks like. We don’t get to see it nearly often enough. But yeah, it’s solar panels all the way down.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And so you’ll see these things, they will flop out a couple of times. Sometimes it’s several folds.
And what was a 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter piece of the satellite flops out into three 10 by 30 or maybe even 30 by 30 or even bigger. They can flop out more and more of them and try and be able to collect as much power as required for the mission. And then of course, part of that control thing is keeping those solar panels filled with energy.
So it is a big challenge. But it is, you know, the miniaturization is, is helping that happen because it’s, it’s making the power demands of all of the parts of the satellite lower and lower and lower, making that part simpler. All right.
I want to move on to the, to the, the actual missions and the actual science that can be done with these, but it’s time for another break and we’re back. All right. So let’s talk about the science.
What can you do with a CubeSat?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So my favorite thing that has been done so far was the two satellites, they traveled within sites. So the, the two CubeSats, Mars One mission, it was two sets of six unit CubeSats. Now, normally.
[Fraser Cain]
Those are the Marcos.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, the Marcos. So normally when, when you have something landing on Mars, you might have one of the standards like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, one of these orbital missions that’s working as a relay satellite for you. And the relay satellites can’t simultaneously receive and transmit on the same frequencies.
So this means we don’t generally get real time telemetry from the missions. Well, what they could do was use these CubeSats to send the telemetry back. So we were able to get data during landing that we’ve never been able to get before just by using them as a, as a relay.
They took some images. They then continued on throughout the solar system.
[Fraser Cain]
It was a flyby for them.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It was a flyby for them. They did not have the propulsion abilities to get themselves into orbit.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And that was really a dramatic improvement because you had CubeSats, 6U CubeSats, as you’re saying, that were capable of sending and receiving signals from Mars to Earth. And normally you sort of think about it, you would flip it around and you’d say, well, we could send CubeSats to Mars.
They’re not going to be able to communicate home. But if there’s a relay there, then we could use a relay. Like maybe they could send their messages through Reconnaissance Orbiter or Mars Express or something like that.
But in this case, they were the relay. They were doing the heavy lifting of the communicating back and forth, which was an amazing proof of concept and, you know, and will show us what could be. And then, and then you could have the other way.
Like if there is infrastructure at Mars, you could have the other way where you, you just send CubeSats there. You know, they don’t need a lot of transmission because they just have to be able to communicate with some kind of relay there at Mars or at Jupiter or at Saturn. Like imagine this future where you’ve got a giant transmitter at Jupiter and its only job is to send messages home.
And then you send a thousand CubeSats at Jupiter and they all just keep communicating with the big transmitter. So, so it’s a, it’s a really interesting way to sort of look at the future of space exploration.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it allows countries that don’t normally have the budgets to do big budget missions to get engaged. So with the DART mission that went to Didymos and Dimorphos, this was a primarily NASA mission smacked itself into Dimorphos. Afterwards, it’s not like the dead mission can really send any information home.
But flying alongside was LuciaCube, which was an Italian space agency mission. It was another six unit CubeSat. It took not the highest resolution images one has ever seen, but it took images and it was able to send those home and it paved the way for the European space agencies.
Hera mission has two. I have no idea how to pronounce these. I’m like staring at what I wrote down going, I’m just going to say, I don’t know how to pronounce these.
Hera is traveling with two CubeSats of its own. Wavaton, Wavaton and Malani. They really need to like put little audio recordings of their missions on their website.
[Fraser Cain]
Somebody from the European space agency saying the name correctly in their native tongue. Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes, we need this. And so this is now one of the things we do is we send these missions. And what’s cool with LuciaCube, it’s now on its way to another asteroid.
So it was used to watch what DART was up to. And now it’s going to do further exploration.
[Fraser Cain]
That’s so cool. The Chinese have mastered this idea of the little floating selfie. When you had the Tianwen mission arrive at Mars, when it was in orbit, it released a selfie, a little, just a tiny little camera that was able to take a picture of itself.
So that just, you know, like literally just a selfie, like, you know, Hey, I’m in front of Mars and send that home. Like I’m sure like check to make sure that the spacecraft is doing fine. There’s no damage and blah, blah, blah.
But no, it was a selfie. Now, what about, what about the earth? Because, you know, we talked about some solar system exploration, but this is where CubeSats really shine.
It’s helping us to explore the earth and to be space telescopes.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Right. And it’s how we’re testing technologies left and right. And this goes back to the origins of CubeSats.
So the very first CubeSats came out of a collaboration between Cal Poly and Stanford back in 1999. The idea was we want university students to start being able to do space-based research. And this is a way we can do it by setting up a off-the-shelf platform with, I mean, it’s essentially the Raspberry Pi and some of them actually use Raspberry Pis.
It’s the Raspberry Pi of satellites where you just go to your, it’s a website. You go to a website that sells components. You figure out what pieces you want and you can assign your class.
[Fraser Cain]
Yes.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Go do this thing.
[Fraser Cain]
A huge chunk of, of CubeSats are done by university classes, by students. And this is the exact thing. They’re given a budget.
The launch is paid for. Their job is to build the satellite during their, during their class. Yeah.
And, and try to answer some kind of scientific question about the earth or demonstrate some kind of technology in space. Yeah. Using this CubeSat platform.
And, and everything has become so streamlined now. You said like usually you ride as a ride share, but there are like standalone CubeSat launches. SpaceX will occasionally do one where it launches, I don’t know, 60 satellites.
Just a collection of CubeSats all packed together into, you know, they’re some kind of Tetris shape to be able to launch these things into space. So that is one of the things, which is great because in the olden days, you know, you would go to university and you couldn’t actually work on a mission until you had your chops and you were part of NASA or ESA or whatever. And now, yeah, you, you show up in getting your aerospace engineering degree at some university and you’re building a satellite that’s going to launch and, and do some kind of function.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And what’s wild is if you go to Kickstarter, there are people who are kickstarting their, their CubeSats. And over the years, we’ve seen them where like you can use the API to have a CubeSat take an image for you of your place on the planet and send it back to you. And it’s thoroughly silly at a certain level, but we are getting to the point where we can start to imagine launching as a small business.
You can imagine like farm companies, fertilizer companies using this to launch a small satellite that can replace just one hyper specific thing that we’re no longer able to do. Because it turns out a lot of earth satellites are in the process of falling out of the sky in the next couple of years. It’s really troubling.
But if you launch one little CubeSat that can do one very specific thing, you can start to get what your company needs to continue functioning. And you can do it for a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on the size you need.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So even though there are amateur groups that are coming together to build satellites, there’s a lot of great ways to do this.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Amateur ham radio folks are using them.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And so you can imagine that this technology will continue to advance, that we’ll get more and more intelligence into the chips, that we’ll be able to process data and try to do some of the data reduction on sites. You can send less data back home.
So this is a thriving industry and you can expect it to continue to grow and miniaturize until, I don’t know, they disappear and still do work out there in space.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it’s unfortunately, they do have a high death rate.
[Fraser Cain]
Yes. Yeah. I mean, even for launch, but yeah, they don’t last long.
I mean, you won’t see your CubeSat for more than five, you know, lasting more than five years. They don’t last long.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And they often die on launch because again, they do like hit each other as they get yeeted.
[Fraser Cain]
And you just can’t afford to put in the kind of testing, put it in a vacuum chamber, put it on a shake test, spend the kind of money that’s required to ensure that thing is as robust as might be required for your mission. Yeah. The failure rate on CubeSats is pretty high.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. So they are high risk, but the return on investment when they do work is about as good as it gets. And this is how we’re testing tomorrow’s hardware today.
It’s a great way to try out new ideas.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So there was a story that we reported on Universe Today about some students who were proposing to build a CubeSat, like a 6U CubeSat that would test out a new kind of ultraviolet space telescope and a new kind of mirror technology. So a new kind of sensor, a new kind of mirror technology on a CubeSat.
And that this would decrease or increase the technological readiness because it would only cost you a couple hundred thousand dollars and you would take this possible technology methodology that could be used for a future giant flagship ultraviolet telescope and just test it in space. And then you know whether or not this system actually works in that environment. And then you decrease that or increase, I forget the way you say it.
Level one in technological readiness is it’s just an idea. Level nine is that it’s been tested in space. So you’re going to be increasing the technological readiness.
And we saw that with James Webb, that it had a bunch of low technological readiness level advances that needed to be built. And that a lot of the budget overrun that happened with James Webb and the time overrun came because these things were hard and someone had to figure out how to do them. And so you can go and look at the things which are really good ideas but they haven’t been proven in space.
You package it up into a CubeSat and you toss it out a window and now you can show that it actually works in space. So it’s a really great technology that’s going to help space exploration in so many ways.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And this is where the Artemis 1 had an entire suite of CubeSats on board. Now the CubeSats that they selected all had to be using technologies that were TR-9, previously tested in space level technologies, but they were combined in new ways. These were new ideas.
And going to the moon with CubeSats, this is the future. This is how we’re going to be able to readily communicate with all the little things we’re planning to stick all over the moon in the coming years. It’s the way of the future and I am really looking forward to the day that hopefully will come in the next five years as the asteroid Apophis flies past our planet.
It’s going to be close enough that we should be able to like just go meet gravity well with some CubeSats as it zips on by and now we have CubeSats following an asteroid that likes to get uncomfortably close to our planet and that will be fun. Yeah, very cool. All right, thanks Pamela.
Thank you Fraser and thank you so much to all of the folks out there that mean I don’t have to fundraise for Astronomy Cast. You guys make it possible for me to keep the team going, keep our servers going and I am so grateful. So this week I would like to thank Alexis, Antasaur, ArcticFox, Borja Andralevsval, Benjamin Carrier, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Bruce Amazine, Burry Gowan, Claudia Mastriani, David, David Bogarty, David Green, Dr. Jeff Collins, Dwight Ilk, Ed, Elliot Walker, Fairchild, just as it sounds, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Hal McKinney, Janelle, Jeremy Kerwin, Joanne Mulvey, Joe Holstein, John Herman, Kate Sindretto, Kenneth Ryan, Lee Harbourn, Lou Zealand, Matthias Hayden, Michael Hartford, Michael Purchada, Michael Regan, Mike Haizu, Nala, Papa Hotdog, Paul L. Hayden, Pauline Middleink, Philip Grand, Robbie the dog with a dot, Reuben McCarthy, Sam Brooks and his mom, Sergey Manilov, Steve Rutley, Tiffany Rogers, Tim Garrish, Travis C. Porco, Wanderer M101 and Will Hamilton.
Thank you all so very much. Thanks everyone and we will see you next week. Bye-bye.
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