Rocket Lab

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A community for discussing Rocket Lab, the US/New Zealand aerospace company. All posts related to Rocket Lab are welcome.

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Rocket Lab-built Mars smallsats arrive at launch site (spacenews.com)

submitted 3 months ago by llamacoffee@lemmy.world to c/rocketlab

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[–] Dave 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If these are smallsats, what does a normal sized satellite look like?

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Each of the twin spacecraft — called Blue and Gold after the colors of the University of California Berkeley, which will run the mission — weighs 524 kilograms

These days, anything under ~1 tonne or so is considered "small". Spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Psyche were each over 2 tonnes at launch, and some geostationary communications satellites can be upwards of 10 tonnes and the size of a school bus.

[–] Dave 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking a cubesat was a small satellite 😃. I guess thats micro or something.

I guess I've never considered how big the satellites were until seeing that picture next to the people.

I guess with the square-cube law, one 10 times as heavy might only be twice as tall.

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I’ve never considered how big the satellites were until seeing that picture next to the people

Yeah, humans for scale definitely help:

Here's ViaSat-3 Americas:

And here's a 1:1 scale model of the unfolded JWST:

Spacecraft can be surprisingly large.

[–] Dave 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This is going to sound weird given my surprise, but JWST seems smaller than I expected! I definitely expected the mirror array to be like 10 or 20 people tall or more, not 3.

To be fair, I also didn't expect Hubble's mirror to be not much bigger than a person.

All the ground based telescopes throw off my expectations.

Edit: Actually, I think it's the radio telescopes throwing off my expectations