Calculating atmospheric drag on satellites for a Cubesat [pdf]

36 pointsposted 4 days ago
by walrus01
(osti.gov)

8 Comments

snthd

a day ago

Related - spaceweather.com measure drag using the decay of starlink orbits.

https://spaceweather.com/starlink/starlink_drag_explainer.ht...

stymaar

a day ago

Clever idea, too bad they didn't bother writing down their blog post themselves and posted AI slop instead.

voxleone

a day ago

>>AI writing is everywhere -- except here. This website is written by Dr. Tony Phillips, a carbon-based lifeform with 30 yrs of forecasting experience.

Could they be lying?

ck2

a day ago

could LEO sats have pitot tubes? would they work at ultra-low drag?

my Stryd has a pitot tube and can detect 1mph wind fairly accurately

some advanced drones also have pitot tubes

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitot_tube

* https://store.3dr.com/pitot-tube-set/

echoangle

a day ago

I don’t think so, the pressure you’re measuring would be extremely small. The air at that altitude is acting as a free molecular flow, there’s not a lot of molecules that exert pressure. I think you would need some exotic detector that essentially can detect individual molecules hitting the surface, the pressure itself is tiny.

Maybe the sensor types used for ultra low vacuums could detect the pressure, but I’m not sure if you could gather enough molecules in a front facing tube to get a pressure increase over ambient.