by Chris Bradley | Sep 30, 2021 | News
Not that long ago it was widely assumed that if we’re not talking about Earth, then we’re not talking about water. Earth is awash in water. The stuff covers over 70% of its surface. Most of this is salty ocean water. A much smaller percentage is fresh...
by Chris Bradley | Jul 12, 2021 | News
Scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December 2021, a Mini-Cubes PocketQube satellite will serve as proof of concept for the prevention of “man-in-the-middle” data hacks. Data breaches cost millions of dollars every year. IBM’s annual Data Breach Report...
by Chris Bradley | Jul 7, 2021 | News
Imagine a snow globe in your hands after you’ve shaken it. That’s a good way to picture the debris field around Earth, where millions of objects both large and miniscule—from dead satellites to paint and exhaust particles—swirl in geosynchronous and low Earth orbit....
by joe.latrell | Jun 11, 2020 | News, Spaceflight
Recently we started building out our solar panels for the Serenity CubeSat, a project we have been working on with Teachers in Space. The process we used to build them is featured the two videos below. There were problems but we have figured them out and are moving...
by joe.latrell | Jan 26, 2020 | News
Today, I found out that Bob Cringely has been working on a space startup that will launch CubeSats to orbit using a rapid turnaround method. The details (as such) can be found at his web site, cringely.com. If you need to get a 12 pound CubeSat to space and do it...
by joe.latrell | Jan 24, 2020 | News
In November 2019 we successfully launched the data package that was destined for the Discovery satellite. Alba Orbital was kind enough to carry the chip in their hardware for Mini-Cubes. The neat thing is that you can track the flight of the photos, images, drawings,...
by joe.latrell | Dec 1, 2019 | Discovery, News
Time for one of those good news/bad news posts. The bad news is that Discovery PocketQube is not going on the RocketLab flight as planned. The good news is that all of the images, books, videos, etc are still flying. So what happened? In a nutshell, the paperwork...
by joe.latrell | Sep 30, 2019 | Discovery, News
We have finally installed a vacuum chamber that can drop the pressure to 2,500 mTorr (we can go to 500 mTorr) if we need it. That pressure is pretty close to what Discovery will experience in space. I ran the first test with the Engineering model for over six hours....
by joe.latrell | Sep 3, 2019 | News
Today, I will be going wheels up bound for Glosgow, Scotland. The 3rd PocketQube workshop is starting on Thursday and I am planning to give a talk on the progress we have had here. A few more milestones, some testing and then we integrate into the AlbaPod bound for...
by joe.latrell | Aug 6, 2019 | News
It took a couple of modifications but the cleanroom has achieved operational status. In order to qualify, we need to have less than 352,000 particles larger than 0.5 microns. We also must have less than 2,930 particles larger than 5 microns. Those numbers are per...
