CHIPSat will map the entire sky to a depth of about 40,000 seconds per resolution element (resel). Each resel is 5° × 26.7°; approximately 316 resels are required to cover the entire sky. This map should provide high S/N detections of the strongest emission lines.

SpaceDev is under contract to design and build the spacecraft, integrate the science payload, integrate the flight system to the launch vehicle, and operate the CHIPSat Observatory for one year. CHIPSat is a three-axis stabilized spacecraft, with a solar-panel array roughly orthogonal to the field of view of the spectrograph. The mission will last one year.