Entry Four - Ideas

What is a good CubeSat project?

I did quite a bit of reading to try to narrow down the projects I could choose for my CubeSat. I am a aspiring underwater photographer and I am very interested in monitoring the health of coral reefs. One project I considered was monitoring small remote vulnerable areas of healthy coral reef and assessing changes in color, a prominent sign of bleaching. However, there is already a lot of satellite reef data and outfitting a CubeSat with high resolution cameras and downlinking the large data could be complicated. Another project I considered was measuring ocean sheen as a marker of organic pollution levels - such as those caused by oil spills. Reading further about this, I realized “above Earth pics” would need to be heavily “cleaned up” to get rid of atmospheric distortions. Again, probably beyond my scope at this point. I then considered determining effects of low gravity on biotech drugs. These drugs are large formulations - usually a liposome encapsulating an active drug entity. Among key quality factors of these drugs are things like aggregation and uniform shape distribution, factors very susceptible to the strength of gravity. There could come a time when these types of drugs may need to be stocked in the medicine cabinets of prolonged manned flights to space. While I have some ideas how this could be explored onboard a CubeSat, the experimental set up would be complicated. Maybe something I can revisit in the future. And then I stumbled on a project that I feel is very feasible for me to do: assess impacts of space radiation on electronics. That’s a Bingo!