Oh thanks! It was a fortunate stroke of collective creativity. We didn't come up with a potato, but we did come up with something cool.

We are not the first people to do a drag sail by any means, so companies are already using this tech. The difference is that we did it faster and WAYYYYY cheaper than it's been done before, especially at the scale of a cubesat.

Our aerospace professor Rick Fleeter had access to a launch slot so 4 of us decided to spin up the project into something big. It grew from there into a team of 65+ plus students and engineers from across the world. All the engineering and fab was done at Brown by students; the multinational part of the team was our launch partner, D-Orbit, who provided a carrier satellite for the ride up to space.

NOICE! I followed up over there too.

There is actually atmosphere in space! The atmosphere never really ends, it just kinda slowly gets less and less dense. Technically, there's Earth atmosphere on the Moon, but it's just suuuuuuuuuper duuuuuuper basically-not-really-there. Also, the Sun spews hot space gasses at us constantly so there's drag from that too.

At 550km where SBUDNIC was initially deployed, there's very very little but- over the course of thousands of orbits- the drag adds up! It takes a long time.

Yeah…

And then Russia invaded Ukraine about 4 months after we filed the legal paperwork cementing the name in place.

The principle stays the same though- faster, cheaper, proof of concept.

Yes! There’s a ham radio on SBUDNIC. We tapped into the TinyGS network. Our specific module was the RFM96. This part of the mission failed. We also built two wide angle cameras into the front end of SBUDNIC, with the intent that we would transmit a couple potato vision quality images down from space over ham band. We tested the ever-living daylights out of that subsystem and- for reasons that will forever remain unknown- it just failed to work on orbit. We never actually heard a radio ping of any kind from SBUDNIC.

That being said, we know the satellite was alive- at least in the beginning- otherwise the sails would not have deployed.

We optimized for satellite lifetime rather than broadcast frequency. It’s totally possible that we were just never in the right place at the right time to catch SBUDNIC’s radio blast. It was set up to transmit every 10 minutes, for about a minute. The TinyGS network is pretty great, however we were broadcasting at 50mW so it was a VERY quiet signal even in the best of times. It’s not impossible- it’s been done before by other satellites- but it’s certainly challenging.

A bunch of us took a class called ENGN1760: The Design of Space Systems, taught by Rick Fleeter. Rick is a true spacelord engineer through and through (among his many achievements: he invented and launched a precursor system to GPS) so he’s- as you’d imagine- pretty well connected. He came into a launch opportunity and passed it on to the class.

At the end of the semester, four of us decided to keep going and build the project into what it is today. We grew the team to ~40 folks at Brown, and then another ~25 folks elsewhere in the world who were consulting/helping out/working with our launch provider. No one got paid- everyone did this out of the love of the game. Pretty amazing.

We aren’t the first folks to put a drag sail on a satellite but we are likely the first folks to do it as cheaply and quickly as we did it. Our hope is that the satellite demonstrates that deorbiting is not expensive, from both a financial and mass perspective. The system cost maybe $150 and weighs ~$250 grams. In the space world, that’s pretty damn good. About $140 of that build cost was the Kapton film- that stuff is expensive!- so if someone were to find a more affordable space-safe material, the system could be made far more cheaply. I would love to see that.