NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA's First Minisatellite Mission Comes to Successful End

An artist's rendering of the FASTSAT minisatellite in Earth orbit. (NASA/MSFC)
View large image After two successful years of on-orbit operations, NASA's Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, or FASTSAT, mission is coming to an end. FASTSAT successfully demonstrated a capability to build, deploy and operate a science and technology flight mission at lower costs than previously possible. The satellite was designed, developed and tested over a period of 14 months at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., in partnership with the Von Braun Center for Science & Innovation and Dynetics, both of Huntsville, and the Department of Defense's Space Test Program.

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NASA's ability to rapidly develop and launch ground-breaking technologies into space just got more efficient and less expensive. NASA is pulling together engineers and scientist from across the country to develop and fly very small satellites, also called nanosatellites, in extremely short time frames. Small satellite missions provide NASA with valuable opportunities to test emerging technologies and economical commercial off-the-shelf components which may be useful in future space missions. Using small and very small satellites (weighing between 2-440 pounds) NASA can test innovative science and engineering technologies on a smaller scale in the space environment and better understand how hardware will survive the radiation, temperature and vacuum conditions encountered in space. NASA nanosatellites are designed for a wide spectrum of space missions including biology experiments, testing advanced propulsion and communications technologies.