Pico-satellite capabilities for telecommunication and earth observation

Modern miniaturization technologies allow realization of satellites at very low masses. For the example of the picosatellite UWE-1 (University Wurzburg's Experimental satellite); design details for such spacecrafts with at a mass below 1 kg will be discussed. UWE-1 was launched in 2005 in order to optimize Internet Protocol parameters in adaptation to the measured space environment, specifically at significant delays and at higher noise levels compared to terrestrial links. Such miniaturization often limits the power and data transmission resources,and thus the achievable performance. Therefore concepts for formations of small satellites have been developed, where multiple pico-satellites complement each other in swarms to realize a fault-tolerant, robust system. Here observations take advantage of large baselines between the sensors placed on the different satellites. Thus, due to the different viewing angles, even three-dimensional structures can be indentified. The limited implementation costs for pico-satellites encourage strategies to store such picosatellites for situations, when reconnaissance data are required quickly, as in case of disasters, like earthquakes, floodings, and forest fires.