I was talking with a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute recently, and he mentioned a new project he had to track penguins. From space. With his own personal satellite. These days you can put up a cubesat, a block about 10 cm on a side and weighing no more than 2 kg, for about $100,000. You can buy standard packages with power, communications, and orientation, and have it go up with a pile of others as spare payload on an unrelated launch, a “rideshare”. They launch them from the ISS too. If they have a good educational or scientific purpose, NASA will do it for you. They tend to be in low orbits, so they burn up after a year or two, and so don’t contribute to space junk. This guy noted that penguins are way too small to see individually, but you could track the smear of feces they left on ice floes, so long as you could get enough photons in the right band as the satellite zipped by. So for the price of an expensive car, you could have your own instruments in orbit!

Last month MIT had its annual Technology Day, a set of lectures by faculty to alumni during Reunion Weekend. This year the theme was what the school was doing in outer space. Video here: Research From Above and Beyond: MIT in Space. The first speaker, Prof. Keri Cahoy, talked about she’s doing with nano-satellites:

This is a set of four satellites in low orbit. They launched in May 2023 on two Rocket Lab Electrons in New Zealand. They can measure the temperatures of the ocean and atmosphere at much higher resolutions than existing weather satellites, and do it every hour instead of once a day. That provides a lot more data about hurricanes, something we really, really care about.

Her other project is testing a new way to communicate with satellites by using direct laser links:

On the ground this uses a standard 28 cm Celestron telescope, a nice size for amateur astronomers. It zooms in on the satellite, which does tiny adjustments of the beam to correct for distortion of the atmosphere. It doesn’t need big radio antennas or big solar panels to drive them, or a license for the crowded radio bands. Next year they’ll have the satellites talking to each other so there can be a continuous connection to one ground station. The link only provides 10 Mb/s, but if the satellite itself can do some analysis, the data rate can be reduced and the whole thing made vastly cheaper. This is also the idea behind Internet-of-Things chips, which can sense things about the world and network together to get the info somewhere. Those cost $1 and these $100,000, but that’s still vastly cheaper than existing satellites with laser links. This was built by students! It went up to the ISS as cargo, and the astronauts there tossed it into orbit with the big robot arm.

The other speakers were not doing nano-satellites, but also doing cheap stuff in space:

Prof Jeff Hoffman – Flew five times on the Shuttle, and helped fix Hubble. He wants to make liquid oxygen on Mars for use as rocket fuel, because there’s no way to send enough there to get back. It’s also needed for breathing! He got a package, MOXIE, on the Perseverance rover to try it out. It works! But it only makes 12 grams per hour and needs a lot of solar power. They really need a nuclear reactor up there. Even an Apollo-level program wouldn’t be able to put humans on Mars, so much, much cheaper approaches have to be found.

Prof Taylor Perron – Has been studying the geography of Titan, which is the only other body in the Solar System that has something like Earth’s atmosphere. It’s mainly covered with nitrogen at -180 C, with lakes and rivers of methane and ethane. He used data from the Cassini mission to Saturn to find hills, valley, and rivers. One looks like it has the volume of the Mississippi! Basic geometry gives you the same shapes even with wildly different chemistry.

Prof Erin Kara – played an eerie sound which is the audio version of light pulses refracted around a black hole. X-rays get generated close to the hole and get wildly red-shifted as they come up out of the intense gravity well. They then get refracted from gas flowing around the hole, which gives us a density distribution of what’s going into it.

One message from these talks is that even super-expensive projects like Perseverance and Cassini can have cheap rideshares. They generate so much data that researchers are kept busy for years! Even if you’re not putting up your own hardware, there is so much happening in space these days that everyone can take part.