For the purpose of protocol, the Queen is Great Britain and the President is the United States.
The 105 cracker-size miniprobes successfully phoned home in March, one day after deploying from their KickSat-2 carrier spacecraft, mission team members announced yesterday (June 3).
"This successful demonstration confirms that incredibly tiny, inexpensive spacecraft are more than just possible — they're real," Mason Peck, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell and the director of the university's Space Systems Design Studio, said in a statement.
"KickSat has kick-started the democratic space age," added Peck, who served as NASA's chief technologist from November 2011 to January 2014.
The KickSat project began at Cornell in 2011, and team members — led by Zac Manchester, now an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University — developed the little craft with the aid of a crowdfunding campaign.
The chipsats, known as Sprites, weigh 0.14 ounces (4 grams) and cost less than $100 apiece in parts, team members said. Their bodies are square circuit boards measuring a mere 1.4 inches (3.6 centimeters) on a side. Despite this bantam frame, each Sprite features an onboard power and communications system, as well as several sensors.
The original Sprite-carrying KickSat launched in April 2014, along with a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The cubesat deployed successfully into orbit, but the team could not get the Sprites flying freely before KickSat came crashing back to Earth.
But Manchester and his colleagues kept working. They built and loaded up KickSat-2, which launched last November aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo craft headed for the ISS. The freighter dropped KickSat-2 off in Earth orbit in February, after departing from the orbiting lab.
The Sprites didn't deploy from the shoebox-size KickSat-2 until March 18. Team members spent the ensuing weeks analyzing mission data, and they have now determined that the chipsats were able to beam down radio transmissions in the 400-megahertz range a day later, using just a few milliwatts of solar power.
On March 21, the Sprites fell back to Earth as expected, burning up in our planet's atmosphere.
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https://www.space.com/tiny-chipsats-ace-demonstration-mission.html