Next Generation CubeSats and SmallSats: Enabling Technologies, Missions, and Markets

Next Generation of CubeSats and SmallSats: Enabling Technologies, Missions, and Markets provides a comprehensive understanding of the small and medium sized satellite approach and its potentialities and limitations. The book analyzes promising applications (e.g., constellations and distributed systems, small science platforms that overachieve relative to their development time and cost) as paradigm-shifting solutions for space exploitation, with an analysis of market statistics and trends and a prediction of where the technologies, and consequently, the field is heading in the next decade. The book also provides a thorough analysis of CubeSat potentialities and applications, and addresses unique technical approaches and systems strategies. Throughout key sections (introduction and background, technology details, systems, applications, and future prospects), the book provides basic design tools scaled to the small satellite problem, assesses the technological state-of-the-art, and describes the most recent advancements with a look to the near future. This new book is for aerospace engineering professionals, advanced students, and designers seeking a broad view of the CubeSat world with a brief historical background, strategies, applications, mission scenarios, new challenges and upcoming advances.