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| ArduSat is a crowd-funded satellite project that allows donors to have their own experiments sent into space. |
Five cubesats operating in the ham bands were hand-launched from the
International Space Station in late February, and another seven were aboard a
rocket launched from Japan on February 27. The five cubesats deployed from the
ISS included Lithuania's first-ever satellites - LituanicaSAT-1 <https://www.facebook.com/Lituanicasat1>
and Litsat-1 <https://www.facebook.com/palydovas> - as well as a second crowd-funded
satellite built around an Arduino processor board, ArduSat-2 <http://kck.st/1kHqWAF>.
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| Artist's conception of the STARS-II mother/daughter satellite pair. They will be connected by a tether. (STARS-II website illustration) |
The seven Japanese satellites include STARS-II, a mother-daughter
satellite pair, which will be connected by a Kevlar® tether. Part of the
experiment will be to use the tether to gather electrons from space plasma and
deliver them to the daughter ship, thus producing an electric current without
the need for solar panels. Both companion satellites are equipped with cameras,
and will transmit photos back to earth via amateur radio frequencies. The
daughter ship's photos are supposed to include shots of the mother satellite as
the two orbit the Earth together. More info is available at <http://bit.ly/1oFhQC0>.
