dharak1

I noticed a 6U chassis on that cubesat shop website. Is anyone offering launches for a satellite with that form?

You have to buy the frame from them too. A 2U chassis from clyde space costs 1600$

As far as I know you have to put them together yourself.

I know my science teacher from last year could probably help me raise money for it.

Do we have a better cost estimate yet? Even a LEO mission could be in the hundreds of thousands.

I say we do some maneuvering and see how precise we can get our moment while taking pictures of course.

We still need a place to assemble the cubesat and find out who will handle our funds and contracts.

We need rad hard equipment for this mission.

Maybe we could do a basic orbit change and take pictures before and after?

Two separate missions would be needed because the requirements for each are so wildly different.

We need to start small. Maybe a 2U in LEO to start with and figure things out. People would be more likely to back future projects if we have some experience. The U.S. is probably the best place to construct as that's where the most users are and probably has the cheapest shipping because that's where the parts are already.

I think we should plan our location first. Then we can plan some equipment we want on our LEO mission make a budget and think about funding.

Since we may be doing balloon drops we should do it somewhere flat wide and open like a desert in New Mexico or Nevada.

We would have to set up shop somewhere. Most likely in North America and probably the US.

I like the idea of starting small and doing amateur rocket launches. Not really something I can do because I can't get permits.

The first goal and mission is for sure LEO. We can take pretty pictures and test stuff.

Also we don't get our goals changed every couple terms.

That appears to be the measurement for Phobos. I just ran the numbers and we would have 1.92 Kilos of thrust.

I vote for orbiter and mapping the entire surface. If the craft is still functional after we map the surface we can land it.

If we can get 7 km/s of delta v I think we should send something to the outer solar system like Jupiter or Saturn. A Mars orbiter would be pretty cool too. If we do two missions a moon flyby is a must.

How much deltaV would we have to do a Phobos mission on a 3U?

I've never heard of a 10 kg cubesat. The largest I know of would be a 6U.

I think the plan is to have a camera and possibly a FLIR camera on board. We can always use additional sensors to get different information though.

I think we should name the second one that leaves the Earth-Moon system explorer or adventurer. Something that reflects its goal of leaving the SOI of Earth and doing a flyby of another body.

My thoughts exactly. It would let us test a few different ways of navigating space and how we would get our bearings. We could get a few pictures send some data and deorbit it or wait for it to decay and then we could start funding and planning for our next mission.