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.
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.
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
If these are smallsats, what does a normal sized satellite look like?
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.
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.
Yeah, humans for scale definitely help:
Here’s ViaSat-3 Americas:
And here’s a 1:1 scale model of the unfolded JWST:
Spacecraft can be surprisingly large.
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