The “pico satellite” being designed and built in a University of Florida (UF) aerospace engineering laboratory may hold a key to a future of easy access to outer space. This future could see sending satellites into orbit routinely and as inexpensively as shipping goods around the world. The UF satellite is the first ever built at university and may be the first orbiting spacecraft to be built in Florida, said Peggy Evanich, director of space research programs at UF.

Fifty-one years ago, the former Soviet Union inaugurated the space race with the launch of Sputnik. Since then, satellites have transformed communications, navigation and climatology, as well as science and the military. However, satellites remain large, ranging in size from basketball to school bus sized. They are also expensive, with costs typically in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. They are also slowly hand-built as one-of-a-kind devices, rather than speedily mass produced. The National Science Foundation this past fall created the Advanced Space Technologies Research and Engineering Center at the UF College of Engineering. The center will seek to develop “pico- and nano-class small satellites” that can be built and launched for as little as $100,000 to $500,000, according to the NSF. The UF center will receive NSF funding for five years for the research. These small satellites are not anticipated to totally replace larger ones, but rather complement them by adding new capabilities. For example,“swarms” of small satellites could take multiple, distributed measurements or observations of weather phenomena, or the Earth’s magnetic fields, providing a more comprehensive assessment than is possible with a single satellite.

The main impediment to designing small satellites is control: The smaller the satellite, the harder it is to manage its flight path and attitude, or orientation in space. The goal of the UF satellite, nicknamed SwampSAT, is to test a new system designed to improve small satellites’ attitude control. Having precise control is particularly important for such satellites because they have to fly relatively close to Earth in order for their weak communications signals to reach their targets. Because of their proximity to Earth, their instruments must be precisely aimed. SwampSAT is hoped to be completed later this year or early next year. The cost is anticipated to be about $100,000, with a launch in 2009, probably aboard an unmanned NASA rocket carrying other payloads as well. The satellite will fly at an altitude of between 600 and 650 kilometers, or from 373 to 404 miles, and will remain in orbit for several years. A container that could be standardized for use in transporting the small satellites aboard the rocket also is being developed. As with the satellites themselves, the goal is mass production — to be able to transport satellites to outer space in much the same way ships and trucks currently transport goods around the world.

The image shows a prototype of a “pico satellite” that's currently being designed and built in a mechanical and aerospace engineering laboratory at the University of Florida. Far smaller than a standard satellite, the pico satellite is intended to test new techniques to control very small satellites in outer space. The overall goal of Associate Professor Norman Fitz-Coy’s research program is to boost the role of tiny satellites, which could be designed, produced and launched far more cheaply and easily than standard satellites. The completed pico satellite, expected to be launched in 2009, will be about the size of a softball. This prototype is slightly larger than a basketball. (Kristin Nichols/University of Florida News Bureau)