These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller.
There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space station. Another Pi is going up this weekend, which is why I'm posting this today. I'll get to that one, but I wanted to spend some time talking about two things that fascinate me: Raspberry Pis, and putting them space!
In this post, I'll cover:
What is a CubeSat
Who builds and launches CubeSats
How you can build your own CubeSat
Then for a bonus, in today's video, I interviewed two people helping students launch SilverSat into space (this weekend!), and a YouTuber who I've learned a lot from about track satellites (including CubeSats) from your own backyard!
The rest of this post contains a lightly-edited transcript of the video above.
So let's dive in.
What's a CubeSat?
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