At least 300 nano-satellites have been launched into space since 2000 – 255 of them in the past three years alone. Fortunately, the Oxfordshire-based innovation and technology company Satellite Applications Catapult is keeping track of them – and their applications – as visualised on these pages. "We have data on at least 90 per cent of those that exist globally," says Christopher Brunskill, upstream technologies lead at the startup. "We can't be completely sure because there's a lot of military and government activity – not everything is recorded openly."
A nanosat is defined as any satellite weighing 10kg or less, such as the shoe-box-sized modular CubeSats, which cost a few hundred thousand pounds to build and launch, compared to the hundreds of millions required for the traditional full-sized alternative. "It's not just universities – a huge part of this growth is driven by commercial actors selling data," explains advanced concepts lead Florian Deconinck. Companies include San Francisco-based satellite imaging startup Planet Labs, which was responsible for 65 percent of all satellite launches in 2014.
Despite the huge opportunities nanosatellites bring, for traditional satellite operators the idea of hundreds of new players firing things into space has raised concerns.
"Imagine you've got a satellite up there worth £300 million," says Deconinck. "You're going be pretty scared that something impacts it." Part of the aim of tracking these satellite launches is to show how small a contribution they make to the amount of space debris floating around. "There are already more than 21,000 objects larger than 10cm in diameter," he explains. "It's close to half a million of less than 1cm. The total number of nanosats is tiny compared to the amount of material that's already in orbit."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
