A pair of smallsats built by Rocket Lab for a NASA mission to Mars have arrived in Florida for a launch this fall on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
  • threelonmusketeersMEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Each of the twin spacecraft — called Blue and Gold after the colors of the University of California Berkeley, which will run the mission — weighs 524 kilograms

    These days, anything under ~1 tonne or so is considered “small”. Spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Psyche were each over 2 tonnes at launch, and some geostationary communications satellites can be upwards of 10 tonnes and the size of a school bus.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzM
      1·
      3 months ago

      I was thinking a cubesat was a small satellite 😃. I guess thats micro or something.

      I guess I’ve never considered how big the satellites were until seeing that picture next to the people.

      I guess with the square-cube law, one 10 times as heavy might only be twice as tall.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzM
          2·
          3 months ago

          This is going to sound weird given my surprise, but JWST seems smaller than I expected! I definitely expected the mirror array to be like 10 or 20 people tall or more, not 3.

          To be fair, I also didn’t expect Hubble’s mirror to be not much bigger than a person.

          All the ground based telescopes throw off my expectations.

          Edit: Actually, I think it’s the radio telescopes throwing off my expectations