How the hell do they get super-quality whole-earth imagery from cubesats? Their space telescope is just 90 mm in diameter and less than a foot long.

mollwollfumble said:

How the hell do they get super-quality whole-earth imagery from cubesats? Their space telescope is just 90 mm in diameter and less than a foot long.

Multiple passes over the same landscape?

Hopefully the company I’m working in now will be able to launch those into LEO in three or so years.

What I want to know is how many megapixels, what field of view, and what zoom?

They launched 88 of these nanosats from a single Indian Rocket launch this year. Making 149 in orbit in all. Orbital distance is 557 km. View of Earth is limited to 57 degrees from the equator. Or something like that.

That’s enough satellites to have an effect on the total amount of space junk.

Off topic, but still about cubesat constellation launches.

Australian cubesats lost in space found again with help from Dutch telescope, ham radio operators

They’re the first Australian-built satellites to go into space for more than a decade.

Of the 28 cubesats deployed in May, eight are not working.

It turns out NORAD had mislabelled their cubesat. NORAD had mixed up the labelling of the cubesats with another team’s.

As soon as the Dutch dish pointed to what the NORAD data said was the University of Colorado’s cubesat, it detected a weak signal that was clearly from the UNSW satellite.