Fleet of minuscule “chipsats” to launch in July

Nature : On 6 July some 100 chipsats, or tiny cubesats, are to be sent up into orbit near the International Space Station. Each chipsat measures just 3.2 cm² in area and weighs about 5 g. They are to be deployed en masse from a KickSat satellite and, once in place, will use a radio, an antenna, and a pair of 60 milliamp solar cells to transmit data on energy load and orientation. Once that mission is completed, the chipsats will fall out of orbit and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. The launch is the second attempt to test the tiny devices; an earlier satellite launched in 2014 failed to deploy its cargo of chipsats before it disintegrated. Chipsat technology could prove useful for a number of scientific projects, such as determining the amount of drag created by small bits of debris in the upper atmosphere or mapping Earth’s magnetic field.