The design and experiment of stardust femto-satellite

Abstract A femto-satellite usually has ultra low cost and light weight. Thus, a cluster of femto-satellites is able to be deployed massively in a large scale and can reduce difficulties of some aerospace missions such as space multi-point collaborative measurement. Wireless self-organized network can be rapidly established without pre-deployment of fixed infrastructures and thus can make it possible for femto-satellites to collect data of distributed measurement. This paper introduces Stardust, a cluster of femto-satellites, to exploit their capacity of distributed measurement in the space. The design of Stardust consists of subsystems, space self-organized networking and thermal control. After the satellites were launched into the low earth orbit, experiments were carried out to verify the distributed measurement performance including multi-point wireless networking and measurement of the geomagnetic field. Results show that Stardust can work properly and effectively in a long period, which is proved to be a good reference for future femto-satellite design and space distributed measurement systems.