Asteroid Mining Company Planetary Resources Kickstarter Funded Publicly Accessible Space Telescope

I was replying to another thread and realized this information probably deserves its own.


Seattle based (yay!) Asteroid Mining company, Planetary Resources launched just such a campaign to get a publically accessible space telescope built which may be used for exoplanet hunting. They added on another level to help merge this idea with the Exoplanet hunting space telescope advocated Sara Seager: ExoPlanetSat


(Not sure if they reached the exoplanet goal that allows ARKYD to be used for planet hunting though).


For more information see: ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone





Or in Klingon if you prefer:



Keep in mind, just developing, building and launching a small space telescope costs more than $1.5 million dollars raised on Kickstarter to fund the ARKYD.

Something the size of the telescope being talked about in the DARPA thread would take a Kickstarter campaign many, many magnitudes larger than the one for the Arkyd, making such a telescope that size (or even Hubble Size) nearly impossible to be crowd funded in reality.

Big science, still requires big dollars.

Sounds cool, too bad it is based in Seattle.

This concept is much more rational than the moon mining BS that has people all excited. The conservation of momentum factor of mining asteroids makes me far less concerned than the moon.

Good stuff OP.

-FBB

I cant stand the companys buisness model.

They expect me the public to finance via kickstarter and take the risk with no reward while the billionaires involved will get to reap possibly 10's or 100's of billions?

FECK THAT!

Open the company to public share buying then talk to me about investing, I will out a few thousand in but don't expect me to invest for no reward except watch the already super rich get richer.

originally posted by: crazyewok
I cant stand the companys buisness model.

They expect me the public to finance via kickstarter and take the risk with no reward while the billionaires involved will get to reap possibly 10's or 100's of billions?

FECK THAT!

I think you have misunderstood things.

The company, at its own expense is building plenty of these ARKYD telescopes for discovery and characterization of nearby asteroids which can be mined.

The Kickstarter campaign was something COMPLETELY SEPARATE from that as part of its public outreach/education. It was to allow the public to have control over one of these telescopes to among other things send "selfies" (snort) from space. It would also be open to researchers to use for various things. In other words "the People's Space Telescope" controlled by the people who donated.

The Kickstarter funded telescope will NOT be used for asteroid prospecting.

But others like it will.

I hope this cleared that up.

OP you may be interested in this project;
KickSat: A tiny open source spacecraft project
zacinaction.github.io...
Here is the project wiki (successfully launched at $300 per backer): github.com...

Where is KickSat?

KickSat launched on April 14th and is currently circling the Earth once every 90 minutes. See where KickSat is now on the map below.

The Big Picture:

Our goal is to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight, making it easy enough and affordable enough for anyone to explore space. We can do this by shrinking the size and mass of the spacecraft, allowing many to be launched together.

The Sprite Spacecraft:
The Sprite is a tiny (3.5 by 3.5 centimeter) single-board spacecraft. It has a microcontroller, radio, and solar cells and is capable of carrying single-chip sensors, such as thermometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. To lower costs, Sprites are designed to be deployed hundreds at a time in low Earth orbit and to simultaneously communicate with a ground station receiver.

The KickSat Mission:

KickSat is being planned as a technology demonstration mission for the Sprite spacecraft. It is a 3U CubeSat that will house a 1U avionics bus and a 2U Sprite deployer. KickSat will be launched through NASA's ELaNa program and will carry over 100 Sprites into an orbit with an altitude between 300 and 350 kilometers where they will be released as free-flying spacecraft.

They have more information as to accessing the mailing list of telemetry data here:
www.kickstarter.com...

The batteries have not reached sufficient charge and the satellite is expected to re-enter the burn zone by the 16th of May.

This project gives more personal access to space for a reduced cost while sacrificing the power of the project you posted.

Just thought you might be interested in this, hope you enjoy.

-FBB