Earthquakes are a global concern.  Not only are they a major threat to life, but they also present a great danger to regional infrastructure.  Yet, currently there are no means of accurately forecasting imminent earthquake activity.  The mission of QuakeSat is to change all that!  Using an innovative space based technique to search for the emission of Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) magnetic signals, which have shown to be an earthquake precursor phenomenon, groundbreaking methods to predict earthquake activity may become plausible in the near future.

 The three primary mission objectives for the QuakeSat Nano-Sat are:

     To detect, record, and downlink earthquake ELF emission data

     Demonstrate that the CubeSat Nano-Sat design is a cost-effective platform for conducting significant space science research experiments

     Demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing commercially-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts to construct a reliable, short mission micro-satellite

The QuakeSat mission has continued for nearly a year from June 30th, 2003 to the present day. Our target mission life was 6 months. To date, we've downloaded over a gigabyte of data, colleted over some 1700 payload collections.

With mission sucess like this, we've well demonstrated that CubeSats are indeed a cost effective platform for conducting space science missions.

Moreover, COTS parts are definitely viable for use in conducting a short term space missions. All our our components were purchased off the shelf, including from the Internet, local stores and vendors, and mail order.

Send mail to eric.d.tapio@lmco.com with questions or comments about QuakeSat, or this website.
Copyright © 2004 QuakeSat
Last modified: 6/6/2004