ChipSat Design for the DeSCENT Mission

The Demonstration of Suborbital ChipSats Ejected from New Shepard Test Flight (DeSCENT) mission, conducted by Cornell’s Space Systems Design Studio (SSDS) in partnership with the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), is a suborbital endeavor that aims to deploy 100 ChipSats from a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket when the rocket reaches 100 km above the Earth’s surface. ChipSats are a type of FemtoSat (satellite with a mass less than 100 grams) that can fit into the palm of your hand and contain all the fundamental functionality of a spacecraft. The mission’s primary objective is to refine models that predict the freefall of ChipSats by collecting real-world test data, paving the way for future atmospheric science missions. A swarm of falling ChipSats provides a low-cost way to collect data on spatially and temporally varying Earth science and Heliophysics phenomena, such as temperature, pressure, and humidity, over a significant distance. These ChipSats can then downlink the collected data to ground stations or store the information with onboard flash memory for ground recovery. Unlike larger devices that need to reduce velocity to survive ground impact, the ChipSats, with their low ballistic coefficient and small form factor, can survive impact with the Earth’s surface and be recovered with their stored data intact. This paper presents a detailed overview of the ChipSat design for the DeSCENT mission. The ChipSats are developed to meet the mission requirements and balance functionality, size, weight, and power consumption. DeSCENT is expected to launch in late 2026.