Here's a slice of weird: a photo taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station of three small cubes floating by:
What could they be? Balok's warning buoy? Tiny little Borg ships? The ISS trying to roll a crit 18? Nope. Those are CubeSats, small satellites about 10 cm (4 inches) on a side and having a mass up to a little over a kilo. Even though they're teeny, they can be packed with a lot of equipment. Typical mission payloads are pretty diverse, from testing hardware for communications and satellite attitude control, to taking images (and other observations) of Earth, monitoring the satellite's radiation environment, and even detecting dust in space. Because they're small and relatively cheap (well under $100,000 including launch), space missions using CubeSats can be done by smaller institutions, including schools. The picture above is from the deployment of three CubeSats on October 4 - ...
