It maintains its attitude and the orientation of its solar arrays to reduce atmospheric drag, but it's still affected by atmospheric drag.
It likely would not come down in "days or weeks", but angling the panels in the most drag-y position would sure accelerate altitude loss... of course, the ISS constantly maintains its altitude via reboosts anyway.
I don't think there is much worry about debris impacting the ground. The worry is about these things impacting things in space.
Yes and no. The FAQ describes the worst-case lifetime scenario (deployment failure) but not the worst-case debris scenario (I would imagine a single object would be less of a debris threat than a group of smaller objects).
And most payloads this would piggyback on wouldn't inject into purposefully low orbits, because bad air drag is obviously unwanted for the main payload(s) that this would fly with. The higher you go, the longer your on-orbit time will be.
"Cheap and accessible" maybe, but at the price of very little functionality (maybe there's something about the Sprite design that I'm missing here, but it just looks like a solar powered, programmable radio).
And improving launcher technology is the far superior and wide-ranging solution. Of course, it is totally out of the scope of this project so the point is moot.
But there are some payloads that you simply cannot miniaturise. Or at least cannot miniaturise considerably.
Yeah... but it would sure be nice if we saw some numbers relating to what kind of orbit these things would end up in. Something more scientific... maybe like a graph of orbital lifetime based on various different altitudes and probable orbits of primary payloads (that do not have to be actual payloads, just generic 'placeholders' with likely characteristics).
