ANDESITE, a CubeSAT running Android

Astronomy Professor Theodore Fritz will kick off the newly approved ANDESITE project in January of 2013. ANDESITE aims to develop an easy-to-use, rapidly-deployable architecture for dense, low-cost wireless sensor networks in space and planetary science applications. Over the next two years the objectives of the project are threefold: 1) Demonstrate viability of satellite based sensor networks by deploying a 16-node miniature CubeSAT network to study current filamentation in the magnetosphere. 2) Test the scalability of proposed protocols, including localization techniques, tracking, data aggregation, and routing, for a 3-dimensional wireless sensor network using a “flock” of buoyant motes in storm systems. 3) Construct a 1 U CubeSAT running the Android OS as an integrated constellation manager and data mule.

Deployment of Cubelets in groups of 4. First frame shows the first deployment. The second frame shows the release of the second wave. Previously deployed nodes are indicated with red ovals

ANDESITE (AD-HOC NETWORK DEMONSTRATION FOR EXTENDED SATELLITE-BASED INQUIRY AND OTHER TEAM ENDEAVORS) was proposed in response to the AFOSR University Nanosat Program and, in addition to the CSP, will involve the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at BU and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the Georgia Tech Research Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA).