Aerospace Corp. Reports Six Months on Orbit for Its Disc-Shaped Satellites, and a Battery Flaw
The Aerospace Corporation presented the first six months of on-orbit results for DiskSat, a satellite built as a disc 1 meter across and 2.5 centimeters deep, at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City on Aug. 24. Four flew together on the type's first mission, and both a working spacecraft and a hardware fault that permanently disabled three batteries.
According to the conference paper, the four DiskSats launched on Dec. 18, 2025 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on a Rocket Lab Electron, which delivered them to a 550-kilometer orbit inclined 45 degrees. Within two weeks, attitude-control checkout was complete and the satellites were flying edge-on, a position that reduces atmospheric drag while turning the disc face toward the Sun. In that configuration each 17-kilogram spacecraft generates more than 100 watts, with up to 282 watt-hours of stored energy.
Each DiskSat carries a field-emission electric propulsion system, a low-thrust electric engine, which the paper rates at 300 micronewtons of thrust and up to 700 meters per second of velocity change. The team reports commissioning those thrusters and running them for many days continuously to both raise and lower the satellites' orbits.
The fault was in the battery heaters, which drew power unequally. Engineers mitigated it in software, but by the time the change "was fully implemented and uploaded, both batteries on DiskSat C and one battery on DiskSat A were permanently disabled," the paper says in a passage quoted by SpaceNews, which covered the presentation. Darren Rowen, the demonstration mission's chief engineer, called it "a painful lesson learned" and told the conference that "despite this outcome, the mission is on track to complete all of the mission objectives successfully."
Rowen separately told SpaceNews that DiskSat is "the biggest advancement in containerized satellites since cubesats were introduced in the early 2000s."
Aerospace has signed DiskSat licensing agreements with Neumann Space, Orbotic Systems and Satlyt, SpaceNews reported.
