A Survey of CanSat: Architectures, Missions, Educational Impact, and Emerging Trends

CanSat is a compact, recoverable spacecraft surrogate that compresses the full satellite life-cycle requirements, design, integration and testing, flight operations and postmission analysis into a short-duration mission with strict size, mass, and power constraints.This paper surveys mission profiles, subsystem architectures, descent and communications strategies, educational implementations and emerging research trends.We synthesize findings from recent CanSat literature, competition guidelines and final-report practices, highlight environmental/air-quality sensing and autogyro-descent systems and consolidate best-practice design guidelines for robust telemetry, data quality and verification.The survey concludes with open challenges in calibration standards, comparative descent evaluation and longitudinal educational impact.