It’s a Briefcase! It’s a Pizza Box! No, It’s a Mini Satellite

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Thinking small, dreaming big

Orbiting instruments are now so small they can be launched by the dozens, and even high school students can build them.

Recently, officials in California announced that the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history, had been fully contained. The achievement was made possible through the hard work of firefighters on the ground, with some help from above: a swarm of tiny, orbiting satellites that represent the next phase of the space age.
The satellites are operated by Planet Labs, a company in San Francisco that runs the world’s largest fleet of Earth-observing satellites. Its craft number around 140. All of them carry cameras and telescopes. In size, most rival a loaf of bread.
As a group, the satellites can view the same spot on the ground once or even twice a day. Until now, commercial satellites could observe a location only weekly or monthly, if at all. The quicker pace enables the close monitoring of rapid environmental change, including fires, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes and the effects of such events on urban areas.

The Planet Labs fleet is part of a larger trend toward miniaturization. Satellites are shrinking in size and expanding in ambition. Made smaller, the craft are less expensive and more accessible to a wider group of interests, and they enable, among other advances, the ability to observe Earth’s environment more completely and regularly than ever before.
“It’s unbelievably significant,” S. Pete Worden, a retired Air Force general and NASA official who now chairs the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, said of the trend. “At first they were toys. Now it’s revolutionary.”

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