[time-nuts] OT - but of interest?
Magnus Danielson
magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Sat Apr 27 18:59:57 EDT 2013
Hi Chris,
On 04/27/2013 11:07 PM, Chris Albertson wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Gregory Muir<engineering at mt.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm curious if they ever have any problem with earth-based commercial component
>> outgassing clouding the camera optics.
>
> I went to a lecture on the idea of putting a cell phone like object in
> orbit. The idea was that it should have a cost and size about like a
> phone. This is very different from a pico-sat (a 4 inch cube)
> because the pico sat costs $100,000 or more and the phone is under
> $500 The idea is that $500 satellites you don't have to care about
> failures. The plan was to place maybe 100,000 devices in orbit and as
> they fail just launch another 1,000 or so at a time. The proposal was
> to launch them from a rocket carried under an aircraft.
The trouble I see with that approach would be that their failure rate
would be rather high starting at about the same time, the launch, so the
launch rate must be high enough to maintain "service". Also, you would
like to do some basic protection scheme on each phone for them not to
fail completely, as I suspect that temperature gradients isn't ideal of
them. This means that the price per phone goes up and also, the price of
each launch is relevant. The total weight is also a factor, as it
controls the number of devices that can be launched, and hence the
failure rate statistics to maintain service until the last one dies.
A failure of this discussion is the lack of synchronisation or even
syntonization of these devices, or at least transmission of time signals...
Cheers,
Magnus
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