There are five budgets concerning your picosatellite:
-
Cost
-
This is a soft limit because you can always try fund-raising if you exceed your allowance. How much can you afford to spend? If $12,000 is too much, find a cheaper hobby.
-
Weight
-
This is a hard limit. All picosatellites have a capped weight limit that you know in advance (e.g., 1 kilogram entire payload, leaving about 200 grams for the experiment part).
-
Power
-
This is also a hard limit. Your power budget, discussed in Chapter 4, is the amount of power you have via a battery that recharges from solar cells, versus the number of electronics and transmitters you wish to power.
-
Bandwidth
- A negotiated hard limit, bandwidth is traditionally space-based astronomy’s greatest limiting ...