This book details key trends involving the recent formation of scores of companies that build and launch small satellites or provide key components for small satellite constellations. The applications and usage are quite diverse and include student experiments, serious scientific experimentation, and totally new types of commercial constellations, particularly in telecommunications and remote sensing. The explosive growth in the design, manufacturing, and launch of small satellites is one of the most dynamic aspects in the area of space exploration and exploitation today. New commercial space companies such as Planet Labs, Sky Box, OneWeb, and LeoSat are now building and launching thousands of small satellites and cubesats into orbit. Small companies and big aerospace companies alike are getting into this exciting and interesting new business. This is a practical guide that provides advice to students, researchers, LEO satellite companies, and regulators wrestling with some of the new challenges that small satellites present as more and more companies and countries around the world enter the new small satellite arena.

In the past decade, the field of small satellites has expanded the space industry in a powerful way. Hundreds, indeed thousands, of these innovative and highly cost-efficient satellites are now being launched from Earth to establish low-cost space systems. These smallsats are engaged in experiments and prototype testing, communications services, data relay, internet access, remote sensing, defense and security related services, and more. Some of these systems are quite small and are simple student experiments, while others in commercial constellations are employing state-of-the-art technologies to deliver fast and accurate services. This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of this exciting new field. It covers the technology, applications and services, design and manufacture, launch arrangements, ground systems, and economic and regulatory arrangements surrounding small satellites. The diversity of approach in recent years has allowed for rapid innovation and economic breakthroughs to proceed at a pace that seems only to be speeding up. In this reference work, readers will find information pertaining to all aspects of the small satellite industry, written by a host of international experts in the field.

This two-volume set LNICST 357-358 constitutes the post-conference proceedings of the 11th EAI International Conference on Wireless and Satellite Services, WiSATS 2020, held in Nanjing, China, in September 2020. The 91 full papers and workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. Part I - LNICST 357 - details original research and results of wireless and satellite technology for a smarter global communication architecture. The theme of WISATS 2020 is “Intelligent Wireless and Satellite Communications for Beyond 5G”. Part II – LNICST 358 - presents 6 workshop papers: High Speed Space Communication and Space Information Networks (HSSCSIN); Integrated Space and Onboard Networks (ISON); Intelligent Satellite Operations, Managements, and Applications (ISOMA); Intelligent Satellites in Future Space Networked System (ISFSNS); Satellite Communications, Networking and Applications (SCNA); Satellite Internet of Things; Trusted Data Sharing, Secure Communication (SIOTTDSSC).

CubeSat Handbook: From Mission Design to Operations is the first book solely devoted to the design, manufacturing, and in-orbit operations of CubeSats. Beginning with an historical overview from CubeSat co-inventors Robert Twiggs and Jordi Puig-Suari, the book is divided into 6 parts with contributions from international experts in the area of small satellites and CubeSats. It covers topics such as standard interfaces, on-board & ground software, industry standards in terms of control algorithms and sub-systems, systems engineering, standards for AITV (assembly, integration, testing and validation) activities, and launch regulations. This comprehensive resource provides all the information needed for engineers and developers in industry and academia to successfully design and launch a CubeSat mission. - Provides an overview on all aspects that a CubeSat developer needs to analyze during mission design and its realization - Features practical examples on how to design and deal with possible issues during a CubeSat mission - Covers new developments and technologies, including ThinSats and PocketQubeSats

Remote observations of Earth from space serve an extraordinarily broad range of purposes, resulting in extraordinary demands on those at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and elsewhere who must decide how to execute them. In research, Earth observations promise large volumes of data to a variety of disciplines with differing needs for measurement type, simultaneity, continuity, and long-term instrument stability. Operational needs, such as weather forecasting, add a distinct set of requirements for continual and highly reliable monitoring of global conditions. The Role of Small Satellites in NASA and NOAA Earth Observation Programs confronts these diverse requirements and assesses how they might be met by small satellites. In the past, the preferred architecture for most NASA and NOAA missions was a single large spacecraft platform containing a sophisticated suite of instruments. But the recognition in other areas of space research that cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and robustness may be enhanced by using small spacecraft has raised questions about this philosophy of Earth observation. For example, NASA has already abandoned its original plan for a follow-on series of major platforms in its Earth Observing System. This study finds that small spacecraft can play an important role in Earth observation programs, providing to this field some of the expected benefits that are normally associated with such programs, such as rapid development and lower individual mission cost. It also identifies some of the programmatic and technical challenges associated with a mission composed of small spacecraft, as well as reasons why more traditional, larger platforms might still be preferred. The reasonable conclusion is that a systems-level examination is required to determine the optimum architecture for a given scientific and/or operational objective. The implied new challenge is for NASA and NOAA to find intra- and interagency planning mechanisms that can achieve the most appropriate and cost-effective balance among their various requirements.

Space-based observations have transformed our understanding of Earth, its environment, the solar system and the universe at large. During past decades, driven by increasingly advanced science questions, space observatories have become more sophisticated and more complex, with costs often growing to billions of dollars. Although these kinds of ever-more-sophisticated missions will continue into the future, small satellites, ranging in mass between 500 kg to 0.1 kg, are gaining momentum as an additional means to address targeted science questions in a rapid, and possibly more affordable, manner. Within the category of small satellites, CubeSats have emerged as a space-platform defined in terms of (10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm)- sized cubic units of approximately 1.3 kg each called "U's." Historically, CubeSats were developed as training projects to expose students to the challenges of real-world engineering practices and system design. Yet, their use has rapidly spread within academia, industry, and government agencies both nationally and internationally. In particular, CubeSats have caught the attention of parts of the U.S. space science community, which sees this platform, despite its inherent constraints, as a way to affordably access space and perform unique measurements of scientific value. The first science results from such CubeSats have only recently become available; however, questions remain regarding the scientific potential and technological promise of CubeSats in the future. Achieving Science with CubeSats reviews the current state of the scientific potential and technological promise of CubeSats. This report focuses on the platform's promise to obtain high- priority science data, as defined in recent decadal surveys in astronomy and astrophysics, Earth science and applications from space, planetary science, and solar and space physics (heliophysics); the science priorities identified in the 2014 NASA Science Plan; and the potential for CubeSats to advance biology and microgravity research. It provides a list of sample science goals for CubeSats, many of which address targeted science, often in coordination with other spacecraft, or use "sacrificial," or high-risk, orbits that lead to the demise of the satellite after critical data have been collected. Other goals relate to the use of CubeSats as constellations or swarms deploying tens to hundreds of CubeSats that function as one distributed array of measurements.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) and evolutionary computation methods have been successfully applied in remote sensing applications since they offer unique advantages for the analysis of remotely-sensed images. ANNs are effective in finding underlying relationships and structures within multidimensional datasets. Thanks to new sensors, we have images with more spectral bands at higher spatial resolutions, which clearly recall big data problems. For this purpose, evolutionary algorithms become the best solution for analysis. This book includes eleven high-quality papers, selected after a careful reviewing process, addressing current remote sensing problems. In the chapters of the book, superstructural optimization was suggested for the optimal design of feedforward neural networks, CNN networks were deployed for a nanosatellite payload to select images eligible for transmission to ground, a new weight feature value convolutional neural network (WFCNN) was applied for fine remote sensing image segmentation and extracting improved land-use information, mask regional-convolutional neural networks (Mask R-CNN) was employed for extracting valley fill faces, state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection models were applied to automatically detect airplanes and ships in VHR satellite images, a coarse-to-fine detection strategy was employed to detect ships at different sizes, and a deep quadruplet network (DQN) was proposed for hyperspectral image classification.