A Hummingbird in Space

Two distinct trends are apparent in the design and planning of satellite missions. Until the late 1990s, multibillion-dollar space programs centered on large satellites, such as Envisat [1], promised to provide a common platform to support a variety of co-located sensing equipment. A reduction in cost was expected, as several instruments shared a single bus and a single launch. These benefits did not materialize due to the rise of a plethora of engineering and scheduling problems: electromagnetic incompatibilities between diverse technologies; instruments inducing vibrations on the platform that affect other equipment; and deployment-ready instruments waiting for other equipment in earlier development stages. As a reaction to these issues, the second trend where programs based on single-instrument satellites of much smaller sizes and mass began to emerge, eventually leading to the deployment of space devices that nowadays we call small satellites [11].