Planetary Resources launched a Kickstarter project to fund a first-of-its-kind public "Hubble Space Telescope."
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0
From their project site, "The proceeds from this campaign will go to several different areas: 1) To actually launch the satellite into space. 2) To support the spacecraft over its lifetime — including manpower to facilitate the photos, "selfies", monitoring the spacecraft and training the staff at the chosen science center that will take over control. 3) To create an easy-to-use Control Interface that will allow ANYONE to access and control the satellite. 4) To fund the creation of an incredible, interactive educational experience that can be used by schools anywhere, to enable students to experience space in a way that's never been possible."
A public space telescope shares analogous challenges with Unmanned Aircraft Systems - command and control issues, communications issues (including security), mission planning for user sessions, data collection and ground processing, user interface issues - and introduces possible new issues with solutions applicable to down-to-Earth UAS projects, such as error-free methods for control and data collection handoff between user teams, and distributed sessions management with the same vehicle but from different sites (different users controlling the scope from different sites, via the Internet, one at a time or maybe even in parallel?)
There may be opportunities for the DIY Drones community to apply its hands-on experience and lessons learned to a public space telescope operated over the Internet.
Comments
It is a small space telescope, comparable to putting my Meade LX90GPS into LEO is how I thought about it. Should get a much better view outside a significant portion of the atmosphere. It will carry a 5 Megapixel CCD camera. PR expects its resolution will be one arc-second. That's similar to the CoRot satellite optical tube.
Planetary Resources haven't released a lot of technical specs about the satellite. I'd expect electrical momentum wheels powered by solar panels for aiming and tracking. Don't know what their plans are for station keeping, but it should be a low-mass solution so it won't work for a long time. Maybe they plan for a frozen orbit to minimize station keeping (read about that on wikipedia, the orbit is chosen with reference to the Earth's gravitational field's variations in order to cancel out, or reduce, pertubations due to density changes beneath the orbit) but that would require a precise launch to get to that orbit.
Virgin Galactic posted a detailed description of LauncherOne on their web site. I got it wrong, it's White Knight 2 that carries LauncherOne up to 50,000 feet. It's a two stage rocket with sufficient thrust to place the ARKYD into LEO.
There's an opportunity here for third-party open source CubeSat projects to potentially tag along with ARKYD for some interesting experiments, IMO. Don't count the open source projects out - if there's a will, there's a way...
Wait, did I just accidentally delete Monroe Lee King Jr.'s comment when answering the points he raised?
And if I did, I apologize Monroe, I don't know how I did that.
Could you re-post your comment?
As I understand their plan, they will use Virgin Galactic's LauncherOne approach to orbit the telescope from a sub-orbital launch point. (Virgin Galactic's signed on as Planetary Resource's launch vehicle supplier.) The $1 Million US funding level gets one ground station in the Seattle, WA, USA area. Data and command exchanges take place as the telescope passes overhead, a window just minutes wide. More stations will be added if the donations grow beyond $1 Million US. Planetary Resources plan to manufacture a lot of these space telescopes for asteroid hunting. They'll add propulsion, telemetry and power resources to this baseline space telescope version for ventures farther out in orbit to earth-cross asteroids, and beyond. They are financing the development of the satellite series, and its eventual operation. This kickstarter project is a way to reach out to the general public as "partners in space" with a broader use of the technology. It's also a way to prep the technology for operational use.