DeSCENT: Suborbital Demonstration of ChipSats as Gram-Scale Atmospheric Probes

This work introduces the DeSCENT mission (Demonstration of Suborbital ChipSats Ejected from a New Shepard Test Flight) as an early technology demonstration of ChipSats for in-situ atmospheric sensing. ChipSats are centimeter-scale spacecraft assembled onto a single PCB. Taking advantage of strength in numbers thanks to their low cost, mass, and volume, ChipSats are well-suited for higher-risk mission applications as well as distributed sensing. As a pathfinder towards such missions, DeSCENT proposes to deploy 100 ChipSats at the edge of Earth's atmosphere. The suborbital experiment is designed for a Blue Origin New Shepard launch, releasing the ChipSats at approximately the Kármán Line. The fleet of ChipSats shall beacon telemetry throughout their descent, with many expected to survive terminal-velocity ground impact, enabling recovery of detailed sensor logs. The data collected from this experiment serves as a sample dataset to motivate the science case and refines models to predict ChipSat dispersion. This paper provides a mission overview as well as design details of the ChipSat, their deployer, and RF communications.