Gimme dat proooooooooof!

I am Marco, Chief Engineer of SBUDNIC (www.sbudnic.space). The satellite is a 3U cubesat built at Brown University over the course of a year and a half by a team of students, myself included. The whole thing costs about $7500 USD if you were to rebuild it from scratch, uses a novel spring-loaded drag sail to deorbit itself (no space junk!), runs off an Arduino Nano, and is powered by 48 AA lithium batteries. SBUDNIC was launched as part of the SpaceX Transporter 5 mission out of SLC40 on Cape Canveral in late May of 2022.

We just released data that shows that our drag system is working as designed! It's been covered by Phys.org, PopSci, and seems to be pretty popular here on Reddit too.

Our hope is that this satellite demonstrates that responsible deorbiting is possible without significant cost or mass penalty.

Ask me anything!