14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at San Francisco-based startup Planet Labs announce that they have recently delivered a batch of small satellites to NASA, ahead of a planned December 15 launch date. The 28 cubesats will be delivered aboard the International Space Station by a private spacecraft.
The entire cubesat constellation, aptly called Flock 1, was delivered earlier this month to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, in Virginia. They will be ferried to space during the first ISS resupply mission carried out by Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus space capsule.
Flock 1 is an Earth-imaging constellation that will rely on numbers to produce high-resolution data of the planet's surface. These datasets can potentially be used to keep track of natural disasters such as tropical storms and typhoons, and to monitor deforestation on a global scale, Space reports.
Each of the 28 cubesats is capable of producing images with a resolution of 3 to 5 meters (10 to 16.5 feet). The spacecraft themselves measure 30 centimeters long by 10 centimeters wide by 10 centimeters tall (12 by 4 by 4 inches). They will be deployed from the ISS into low-Earth orbit in early 2014.