Very Small Interplanetary Spacecraft - Crazy and Crazier - Livestream

This research project began with a simple question: what is the smallest spacecraft that can deliver a cell phone camera to within one diameter of a near earth asteroid, take a few thousand pictures, and then return to earth and download the images? Two proposed solutions have emerged, both weighing less than 0.1 kg: BLISS - the Berkeley Low-Cost Interplanetary Solar Sail, and BEARS - Berkeley Electrospray Autonomous Robotic Spacecraft.

The spacecraft are designed with off-the-shelf technology, including sensors from cell phones for inertial and image sensing, solar cells and a LiPo battery, redundant radiation-tolerant computation, and both RF and laser communication. We assume that swarms of thousands of such spacecraft will be deployed, and that a mission failure rate of 50% for individual spacecraft is acceptable, allowing for aggressive optimization.

Some simulations of spacecraft trajectories and performance will be presented, as well as some speculation on the theoretical limits to performance of such spacecraft.

Speaker: Kristofer S. J. Pister, UC Berkeley

Attend in person or Watch here.