Space station poised to launch open-source satellites

Want to do your own space experiment? From next week, you will be able to run science projects on the world's first open-source satellites.

...Known as CubeSats, each mini satellite packs an array of devices – including cameras, spectrometers and a Geiger counter – into a cube just 10 centimetres to a side.

The satellites run Arduino, an open-source platform popular with hobbyists, which will let anyone write code for an app, game or research project that uses the on-board instruments...

Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] is not on the Ardusat team, but her students design and build CubeSats for planetary science. "This definitely is helping open up space both to all people and all nations," Seager says of the Ardusat launch.