A plan to deploy a formation 104 “Femtosatellites” ended in failure after 3u-cubesat spacecraft, KickSat, which had been carrying the formation had an electronic fault. Kicksat’s micro controller apparently had suffered a hard reset on 30 April 2014 as the result of a high dose of solar or space radiation. This reset the spacecraft’s clock, delaying the release countdown for the sprite constellation of 104 tiny spacecraft. The release was originally set at 16 days after Kicksat’s own release from the Falcon 9 launch vehicle after its launch on 18 April. Each Femtosat which was effectively just an electronic board with a transmitter and a solar cell power generator, was designed to send a very short digital message to a network of ground stations.
The timer problem on Kicksat meant that the deployment of the 104 Sprite Femtosat subsatellites, each individually having a mass less than 0.1kg, was thus reset to 16 May. Unfortunately, Kicksat was destroyed when it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 14 May 2014. The last orbital data showed that the day before its re-entry Kicksat was in a 159 x 174 km orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination.
