PrintSat was a picosatellite built by Students at Montana State University (MSU) with nano-carbon-impregnated plastic using a 3D printer.
Additive manufacturing (also called 3-D printing) has evolved in the past few years to be a very inexpensive and fast way to make mechanical parts. With PrintSat, the entire structure of the small satellite was printed utilizing industrial 3D Printing using Windform XT 2.0 material.
When in orbit PrintSat was to measure and report on the characteristics of the Windform XT 2.0 printed material and plating during its mission life in order to verify the utility of additive manufacturing for spacecraft structures and mechanisms.
The satellite was launched on the maiden flight of the Super-Strypi rocket from Hawaii into a 415 km × 490 km polar orbit, but was lost in a launch failure.
|Type / Application:||Technology|
|Operator:||Montana State University|
|Contractors:||Montana State University|
|Power:||Solar cells, batteries|
|Orbit:||415 km × 490 km, 94.7° (planned)|
|PrintSat||2015-F03||04.11.2015||Kau LP-41||F||Super-Strypi||with HiakaSat, Supernova-Beta, STACEM, Argus, EDSN 1, EDSN 2, EDSN 3, EDSN 4, EDSN 5, EDSN 6, EDSN 7, EDSN 8|