SBUDNIC is a 3U cubesat built in less than 18 months for $7500.
SBUDNIC (SATCAT 52774) incorporated a coating-based thermal control system, a non-rechargeable primary cell array based on lithium AA batteries, a rad-hardened Arduino Nano, two cameras, a ham radio transceiver, and a novel aerodynamic drag sail used for accelerated passive deorbit.
SBUDNIC was launched, to a 517 kilometer polar orbit, on 25 May 2022 aboard Transporter-5 from Cape Canaveral's SLC40. It successfully deorbited on 8 August 2023.
SBUDNIC
( or )
The Little Satellite
that Could.
SBUDNIC is a multidisciplinary, international cube satellite project initially conceptualized during the ‘Design of Space Systems' class at Brown University. It was designed, built, and launched by a team of 40+ amateurs and students with little to no prior space engineering experience in less than 18 months.
SBUDNIC was entirely built from open-source frameworks and off-the-shelf parts, meaning SBUDNIC can be reproduced for under $7500.
SBUDNIC was “designed for demise,” addressing the long term, existential problem of space junk accumulation in a passive, low-cost way. If left unmitigated, space junk could make human endeavors in space more costly, dangerous, or even impossible
Accelerating Orbital Decay.
SBUDNIC’s drag sail was intentionally designed to reduce the orbital lifetime of the satellite post-mission. The drag sail design is in SBUDNIC's open source technical repository, linked above. The number of active satellites is expected to increase from 9k to 60k over the next 10 years.
SBUDNIC's decay is plotted here against the other mass/surface area comparable satellites also launched on and deployed from Transporter 5.
Periapsis data pulled from space-track.org, live plot located here.
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Engineering
Anthony Bishop-Gylys, Audrey Gallagher, Cameron Goodreau, Christopher Pellinger, Dan Rapoport, David Chen, Dheraj Ganjikunta, Duncan Crane, Eliot Laidlaw, Ethan Zucker, Philip Kierzenka, Gabby Shieh, Haley Rose Flores, Jules Cormary, Kazen Gallman, Laura Jankowski, Lia Lubit, Maddie Simon, Marco Cross, Mia Rollins, Miku Suga, Rick Fleeter, Sejal Shah, Selia Jindal, Shin-Ji Low, Theodore Fernandez, Vikas Rana
Special Thanks
Doug Stern, Jan Gromeš, Lorenzo Bigagli, Matteo Perrota, Mia Cross, Michael Umbricht, Ray Zenick, Robert Mattaliano
Alumni
Aaron Jeyaraj, Ashton Lam, Benjamin Kilimnik, Benjamin Smith, Brennan Vasquez, Daniel Wang, Geoffrey Hazard, Hammad Izhar, Hiro Kuwana, Jared Johnson, Jennifer Wang, Lizzie Kimmel, Madeleine Montagner, Raghav Puri, Riad Hallal, Timothy McDonough, Tucker Wray
