SanoSat: engineer within a five-centimeter cube

SanoSat-1 launched on a Falcon 9 on 13 January 2022. AMSAT assigned it the additional designation Nepal-OSCAR 116, or NO-116, and credited ORION Space, AMSAT-Nepal and AMSAT-EA. Its radiation-sensor and store-and-forward — open definition objectives fit a one-unit PocketQube — open definition, whose nominal body measures five centimeters on each side. An OSCAR designation is another identifier for the same spacecraft, not an additional launch.

SanoSat-2 continued the family on the Transporter-18 mission launched on 1 October 2026. The participant-supplied AMSAT account describes a camera that sends image packets, message storage and relay, and attitude measurements intended to inform future control work. It also uses the name UTNH-SAJILO-SAT. A conflicting coordination label used SanoSat-3; ORION’s public clarification identifies this flight as SanoSat-2 and describes SanoSat-3 as a future plan. These should not become two completed missions.

Compare ideal cubes five and ten centimeters across. Halving the side makes one face one quarter of the area and the enclosed volume one eighth as large. These geometric ratios do not establish an actual satellite’s power or mass, because panel coverage, efficiency, structure and components differ. They do show why shrinking a spacecraft is more complicated than reducing every engineering requirement by half.

A camera still needs energy, storage and a way to transmit its images. Attitude measurements describe orientation or motion; an actuator is needed to change that motion deliberately. Recording sensor data to inform a future control design is therefore a distinct objective from demonstrating that future system. Each flight should have its own testable requirements rather than inherit all capabilities announced anywhere in the family.

Scaling a cube changes area and volume differently

In a simplified store-and-forward scenario, a ground sensor uploads a packet at 09:00, and the spacecraft delivers it to the receiving station at 10:30. The delivery delay is ninety minutes, even if each radio exchange takes only seconds. Such a link can serve delayed observations but does not provide continuous real-time contact.

Now imagine twenty messages arrive between downlink opportunities, while only sixteen can be delivered before the next batch. The queue grows by four messages each cycle unless the team reduces incoming data, adds delivery capacity or discards some records under an explicit policy. Timestamped packets and sequence numbers help users recognize delayed, missing or repeated data. These invented timings and counts teach the tradeoff; they are not measurements from either SanoSat flight.