alt Hacker NewsUltimately it's about the ballistic coefficient. You want high mass, low cross-sectional area, and low drag coefficient (Cd). With propulsion for station-keeping, it's challenging to capture the VLEO benefits with a regular cubesat. That said, there are VLEO architectures different than Clarity that make sense for other mission areas.
Yes it's a big contributor. The atmosphere in VLEO behaves as free molecular flow instead of a continuous fluid.
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HNisCIS • today at 2:29 AM
Why no fold mirror then?
Cue the ultimate low orbit satellite
> It is undesirable to have a definition that will change with improving technology, so one might argue that the correct way to define space is to pick the lowest altitude at which any satellite can remain in orbit, and thus the lowest ballistic coefficent possible should be adopted - a ten-meter-diameter solid sphere of pure osmium, perhaps, which would have B of 8×10^−6 m^2/kg and an effective Karman line of z(-4) at the tropopause
from https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07894