Launching Thinsats

Thinsats are deployed in an approximately equatorial orbit, so that the ground antennas can have a fixed elevation above the horizon. An inclined m288 orbit would change elevation up and down 5 times per day.

orbit	surface	lat45	max	radius	radius	altitude	grav	sidereal	sidereal	Kourou, 5		KSC, 29		Baikonur, 46
name	period	ping	latitude					period	velocity	launch	apogee	launch	apogee	launch	apogee
	min	ms	degrees	km	earths	km	m/s²	sec	m/s	m/s	m/s	m/s	m/s	m/s	m/s
LEO	97	--	17.29	6678	1.05	300	8.94	5431	7726	7532	672	7589	3825	7673	5968
m288	288	63	60.17	12789	2.01	6411	2.44	14393	5583	8669	1102	8725	2502	8809	3705
m360	360	73	63.87	14441	2.26	8063	1.91	17271	5254	8848	1196	8904	2354	9051	4027
m480	480	87	67.70	16756	2.63	10378	1.42	21585	4877	9051	1295	9108	2206	9192	3096
m720	720	110	71.74	20295	3.18	13917	0.97	28774	4432	9289	1393	9345	2055	9429	2758
GEO	fixed	253	81.33	42164	6.61	35786	0.22	86164	3075	9956	1505	10013	1694	10096	1940

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Thinsats peeled off the top of a cylinder of thinsats. The thickness is greatly exaggerated. There will actually be thousands of thinsats in a stack this tall, at about the same spacing as sheets of paper in a ream of paper.

Mechanically, the stack resembles a solid cylinder of silicon with three adjoining cylinders of glass. The heights of glass and silicon layers must be well matched, and the thermal expansion differences between silicon and glass accommodated, to prevent mechanical strain from vibration during launch, and thermal strain when the cylinders cool

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LaunchingV01

Launching Thinsats