Rainbow Room

Technology and Circuits Joint Luncheon Talk

Thursday, June 14, 12:00 p.m.

Nano Satellites, CubeSats, and the Next Space Generation, James W. Cutler, University of Michigan

Enabled by advancements in VLSI and related technology, spacecraft are becoming smaller and more capable and flying to extremely interesting locations. Spacecraft provide global communication, global geolocation, and explore the farthest reaches of our solar system and beyond.  Humanity has landed rovers on Mars, returned space probes after they have landed on asteroids, and discovered liquid oceans on far off moons. Space, though, is an extremely challenging environment. From a system perspective, spacecraft need to be small and light to enable low-cost launches, and proper power management, conversion, and generation are fundamental mission enablers.

In this talk, I will discuss a recent and exciting trend in the space community that is opening up access to space and sparking a wide variety of innovation around the world. The trend is the CubeSat. Invented in California after the successful launch of a student satellite called OPAL that deployed small daughtership satellites, the CubeSat is a standard form factor for satellite structures, 10 x 10 x 10 cm. There are over forty on orbit with numerous others being developed by universities, private hobbyists, large and small aerospace companies, and government labs. These CubeSats are studying the Earth, the Sun, performing technology demonstrations, training the next generation, and attempting to fly to the moon and beyond. At the University of Michigan, we have recently launched three satellites and two more are in production. These missions will be described, punctuated by fascinating stories of success and failure, and emerging challenges for the VLSI community will be highlighted.