Archives for August 2020

The Space Dynamics Laboratory-built Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter satellite has been awarded the Small Satellite Mission of the Year award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) — this announcement was made during the recent annual Small Satellite Conference.

SDL designed and manufactured the HARP spacecraft to carry the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Earth and Space Institute-built HARP payload, which was developed to measure the microphysical properties of cloud and aerosol particles in Earth’s atmosphere.

The Small Satellite Mission of the Year Award is presented annually by the AIAA Small Satellite Technical Committee to the mission that has demonstrated a significant improvement in the capability of small satellites. Missions must have individual satellite wet mass of less than 150 kilograms and must have launched, established communication, and have acquired results from orbit after January 1, 2019, 12:00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time.

To demonstrate significant improvement, nominated missions must show innovation in spacecraft structural design, scientific instrument development, communications capability, attitude determination and control capability, intersatellite coordination, constellation or cluster management, onboard computing, or other mission aspects.

The HARP mission seeks to mitigate barriers to assessing climate change that are caused by the scarcity of measurable data about aerosol forcing, insufficient understanding of aerosol-cloud processes, and cloud feedbacks in the climate system. New observations and a better understanding of aerosol-cloud processes will help to narrow climate change estimate uncertainties.

Executive Comments

“HARP has been a truly collaborative effort between UMBC and SDL, demonstrating how university organizations can collaborate with NASA to advance space science and technology to achieve major earth science goals,” said principal investigator Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins of UMBC. “The Small Satellite Mission of the Year award is a major honor to the HARP team, and a testament to the success of this collaboration.”

“To be selected from the many accomplished small satellite missions throughout this year is an honor and reflects the vision, unshakeable commitment, and scientific expertise of Dr. Martins and his team at UMBC and NASA,” said Alan Thurgood, SDL’s director of Civil and Commercial Space. “The men and women of SDL share in Dr. Martins’ vision for HARP, and we are fortunate to have been able to provide the spacecraft and operational management to help enable mission success.”

“It has been a privilege for SDL to build and operate a spacecraft that is helping to validate new technology, prove the on-flight capabilities of a highly accurate, wide field-of-view hyper-angle imaging polarimeter, and demonstrate that small satellites can provide top-quality Earth sciences data,” said Tim Neilsen, SDL program manager for HARP. “The engineers, technicians, spacecraft operators, and other professionals at SDL remain resolute in helping to ensure HARP meets its mission objectives.”

Recently, GomSpace Luxembourg SARL and the European Space Agency (ESA), signed a contract to continue development and implementation of the Juventas CubeSat in support of the Hera mission.

The contract value is approximately 11,000,000 euros and is focused on the delivery of the Juventas spacecraft and its associated payloads for launch with Hera in 2024. The amount will be divided between several partners, whereof GomSpace share is about 6,100,000 euros.

Together, NASA’s DART and Hera missions, and the international research collaboration known as the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA), will demonstrate deflection technology that could be used to protect Earth from hazardous asteroids by shunting them off a collision course. Juventas is a 6U smallsat containing a low frequency radar, named JuRa, as its primary payload (see Hera’s CubeSat to perform first radar probe of an asteroid).

The smallsat will operate in close proximity to the Didymos asteroid system, focusing radar and radio-science experiments targeting the moon of the binary asteroid, named Dimorphos. Juventas will complete its mission by attempting to land on the surface of Dimorphos, making measurements on the landing dynamics from likely bouncing events to capture details of the asteroids surface properties and end with measurements taken by a gravimeter payload to give insight to the dynamical properties of the asteroid.

GomSpace Luxembourg is the project prime and is also working with GomSpace Denmark and GomSpace Sweden on some spacecraft platform components. The project continues the successful collaboration built from the initial design phase and includes the partners:

• GMV Innovating Solutions from Romania leading the guidance, navigation and control subsystem
• EmTroniX from Luxembourg leading the low-frequency radar payload electronics implementation
• Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble leading the radar concept design and specifications, scientific measurements, and contributing to the receive chain electronics
• Technische Universität Dresden University providing the expertise in RF antenna simulation and test, and contributing to the transmit chain electronic
• Filip Záplata from the Czech Republic contributing to the radar digital design
• Astronika from Poland delivering the deployable radar antennas.
• Embedded Instruments and Systems delivering the gravimeter payload with support in its design and scientific contributions from the Royal Observatory of Belgium

With both GomSpace Luxembourg and EmTroniX centrally positioned in the project it fully supports Luxembourg’s long-term vision for space exploration and exploitation.

Executive Comments

“The Juventas mission will be complementing the larger Hera mothercraft significantly increasing our science return. JuRa will provide the first ever direct measurement of the interior structure of an asteroid. Juventas will also attempt the first ever small body landing by a cubesat to reveal important surface properties. We are very excited to start the implementation phase together with the strong consortium led by GomSpace,” said Ian Carnelli of ESA, Project Manager of the Hera project.

“We are happy to continue our collaboration with ESA and the Hera project on this exciting mission. Juventas will be the first GomSpace designed nanosatellite in deep space demonstrating its capabilities in the harshest environment thus far. As part of the project we will continue to build our deep space capabilities and organisation based in GomSpace Luxembourg,” added Niels Buus, CEO of GomSpace.

“The Luxembourg led Juventas satellite is a very important pathfinder mission cementing our national position as a pioneer in developing the required capabilities for peaceful exploration and sustainable use of space resources,” noted Marc Serres, the CEO of the Luxembourg Space Agency.

PredaSAR Corporation has reported that the company’s first of 48 advanced commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites will launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Inc. is the launch integration provider in addition to manufacturer of the spacecraft. As part of the agreement, PredaSAR, Tyvak and SpaceX will be working together to optimize the deployment plan for the remainder of PredaSAR’s constellation which, according to the company, is the world’s largest and most advanced commercial SAR satellite constellation.

Executive Comments

PredaSAR CEO Maj. Gen. Roger Teague, USAF (Ret), said, “PredaSAR spacecraft possess the latest in space-proven, high quality satellite systems to support scalable and fully capable operations. PredaSAR aims to deliver critical insights and data products to both military and commercial decision makers at the speed of need. We are pleased to fly with SpaceX, a proven launch service provider to further enable the PredaSAR constellation vision of rapid, persistent ISR, anytime and anywhere.”

“We are eagerly looking forward to launching PredaSAR’s constellation with SpaceX, a trusted partner and provider of launches,” said PredaSAR Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Marc Bell. “Our satellite design has benefited from years of advanced research and development from Tyvak and allows us to bring our clients the critical, persistent data that they need.”

“For launch of the first satellite of its constellation, PredaSAR sought a reliable and schedule-certain ride on a rocket with a demonstrated record of executing launches at a high cadence,” said SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales, Tom Ochinero. “We’re proud PredaSAR selected SpaceX as its launch provider for this very important mission.”

Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) is building mission payloads for a Space Engineering Research Center at University of Southern California (USC) Information Sciences Institute smallsat program called La Jument, which enhance Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) space technologies.

For the program, four La Jument smallsats—the first launching later this year—will use Lockheed Martin’s SmartSat software-defined satellite architecture on both their payload and bus. SmartSat allows satellite operators to quickly change missions while in orbit with the simplicity of starting, stopping or uploading new applications.

The system is powered by the NVIDIA® Jetson platform built on the CUDA-X capable software stack and supported by the NVIDIA JetPack software development kit (SDK), delivering powerful AI at the edge computing capabilities to unlock advanced image and digital signal processing.

SmartSat provides on-board cyber threat detection, while the software-defined payload houses advanced optical and infrared cameras used by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to further mature and space qualify Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies. The La Jument payloads are the latest of more than 300 payloads Lockheed Martin has built for customers.

Powering Artificial Intelligence at the Edge
La Jument satellites will enable AI/ML algorithms in orbit because of advanced multi-core processing and on-board graphics processing units (GPU). One app being tested in orbit will be SuperRes, an algorithm developed by Lockheed Martin that can automatically enhance the quality of an image, like some smartphone camera apps. SuperRes enables exploitation and detection of imagery produced by lower-cost, lower-quality image sensors.

Bringing Four Satellites Together
The first of the four La Jument smallsats is a student-designed and built 1.5U cubesat that will be launched with a SmartSat payload to test the complete system from ground to space, including ground station communications links and commanding SmartSat infrastructure while in-orbit.

The second is a 3U smallsat, the size of three small milk cartons stacked on top of each other, with optical payloads connected to SmartSat that will allow AI/ML on-orbit testing.

Finally, two 6U cubesats are being designed jointly with USC that will be launched mid-2022. The pair will launch together and incorporate future research from USC and Lockheed Martin, including new SmartSat apps, sensors and bus technologies.

Lockheed Martin’s more recent smallsat projects include Pony Express 1, Linus, NASA’s Lun-IR, Janus and Grail. Additionally, Lockheed Martin will be the prime integrator for DARPA’s Blackjack small sat constellation.

Executive Comments

“La Jument and SmartSat are pushing new boundaries of what is possible in space when you adopt an open software architecture that lets you change missions on the fly,” said Adam Johnson, Director of SmartSat and La Jument at Lockheed Martin Space. “We are excited to release a SmartSat software development kit (SDK) to encourage developers to write their own third-party mission apps and offer an orbital test-bed.”

“We were able to design, build and integrate the first payload for La Jument in five months,” said Sonia Phares, VP of Engineering and Technology at Lockheed Martin Space. “Satellites like this demonstrate our approach to rapid development and innovation that lets us solve our customers’ toughest challenges faster than ever.”

Exolaunch has signed a launch agreement with Swarm Technologies to launch 24 satellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission.

Under the contract, Exolaunch will provide launch, integration and deployment services to the Swarm satellites. The spacecraft will be launched to SSO on the Falcon 9 smallsat-dedicated rideshare mission targeted for launch in December 2020.

Swarm enables global connectivity with the world’s first low-cost satellite network. The company’s goal is to provide affordable, low-bandwidth, two-way connectivity for IoT devices around the world, particularly in remote areas that lack strong communications infrastructure. Swarm supports IoT devices in agriculture, energy, logistics, maritime, and other sectors. Overall, Swarm is planning to launch a total of 150 satellites into orbit.

The satellites will be integrated on a Falcon 9 ESPA class port and deployed into orbit with the EXOpod, Exolaunch’s proprietary deployment system. Having deployed 80 cubesats of various sizes to date, EXOpod has demonstrated excellent flight heritage and precise deployment into orbit. EXOpod will be mounted on a Falcon 9 ESPA class port with EXOport, a flexible multi-port adapter enabling optimal accommodation of small satellites. After integrating SpaceBEEs into EXOpod at the Swarm’s facilities in Mountain View, the satellite integration with the launch vehicle will take place at SpaceX’s facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Exolaunch procured launch capacity from SpaceX to launch multiple small satellites aboard Falcon 9 as part of SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare Program early in 2020. Shortly after, Exolaunch acquired numerous international customers who signed up for this mission leading to the company extending its contract with SpaceX for an additional ESPA class port. To date, the company has successfully arranged launch campaigns for nearly 100 small satellites and is launching 50 more small satellites into orbit this year alone.

Executive Comments

“Swarm is excited to start launching with Exolaunch, particularly given their successful deployment history with small satellites,” said Sara Spangelo, CEO of Swarm. “They’ve been great partners to work with so far and we look forward to launching with them.”

“Swarm’s nanosatellites network will significantly reduce costs for the end-user and enable wide adoption of the technology. It makes an excellent case for demonstrating possibilities of space economics,” said Jeanne Medvedeva, Commercial Director at Exolaunch. “Our team, experienced in handling large constellations of satellites, is ready to utilize its launch expertise and deployers to arrange the rides to space for Swarm aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9.”

T4i is entering the smallsat market with their first propulsion system product, REGULUS.

This all begun in 2006, with the initial thruster development at the University of Padua. The first thruster version was miniaturized and then surrounded by all tof he other subsystems to build a complete propulsion unit.

REGULUS is almost ready to be integrated in UNISAT-7 for its first launch in October. This is a big milestone for REGULUS; however, this does not represent the end of T4i EP systems developments. Rather this is the only the start…

T4i is already thinking about the future and what will be the firm’s next EP steps. The company has already won a contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) for the development of E-REGULUS, an even more versatile and economically affordable propulsion system.

E-REGULUS is specifically designed to serve platforms in the range between 50 and 200 kg that require thrust capability for station keeping, phasing, drag compensation and other maneuvers. The system is designed with a building block approach, meaning the system integrators can customize the subsystems configuration based on their specific needs. Moreover, E-REGULUS is versatile in using various types of propellant, such as Ar, Kr, Xe, I2, and water.

With a development roadmap of one year and a half, E-REGULUS is entering the smallsat market to become the EP system reference for small space platforms, for LEO and far beyond…

Executive Comment

“Apart being the first EP system using iodine that is going to fly, thanks to its technology REGULUS represents a new era of doing propulsion”, said Elena Toson, T4i Business Development Manager. “To make a correlation, Ferrari cars stands for electric propulsion existing technologies just as Fiat 500 stands for REGULUS. And in the past Fiat 500 completely revolutionized the way people were moving.”

Matteo Duzzi, E-REGULUS Project Manager , said, “We are very proud to improve the capabilities of our system with this project, and to carry out this activity under a programme of, and funded by, the European Space Agency. I particularly like the thruster evolution to target a broader microsatellites power range and the interchangeability of the fluidic line. These will open up new and interesting perspectives, making the system effectively adaptable to different missions and different propellants. In this way it will be easier to match customers’ particular needs.”

The Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) announced during the Small Satellite Conference that the company was recently awarded a contract for two smallsat radios for a NASA asteroid mission — the contract value has not been disclosed.

Making long-distance calls from deep space is technologically challenging even with large spacecraft, and from smallsats, it becomes exponentially challenging. The SDL-built Iris radios will provide communications for dual Lockheed Martin small spacecraft being built for NASA’s deep space mission called Janus, to visit near-Earth asteroids, which is led by principal investigator Dr. Daniel Scheeres from the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Janus mission is targeted for launch in August 2022 and will travel more than 10 million kilometers to meet up with the pair of binary asteroids designated 1991 VH and 1996 FG3. The unique asteroid systems consisting of a primary and secondary body are considered rubble piles, made up of many pieces of space rock that have joined together under the influence of gravity.

Scheeres and fellow Janus scientists will study the pair of asteroids to better understand the formation and evolutionary implication of small rubble pile asteroids and build more accurate models for asteroid parameters and evolution.

In deep space, communications for the two miniature spacecraft will be critical to the success of the Janus mission. The Iris radios are designed for just this task — to provide a unique communications architecture to relay valuable mission data through NASA’s Deep Space Network to the mission operations center at Lockheed Martin in Denver.

Developed and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the DSN is a global array of very large radio antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions. According to NASA, the DSN also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve our understanding of the solar system and the larger universe.

Weighing only 1.1 kilograms, and about the size of a half loaf of bread, the Iris radios will use environmentally robust architecture, including radiation-tolerant parts necessary for deep-space communication over multiple years at a fraction of the mass and cost of other radios with similar reliability and capability. The design incorporates advanced thermal management necessary for navigation tracking.

Janus was selected as part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration. SIMPLEx programs are intended to contribute to NASA’s goal of boosting comprehension of our solar system’s makeup, provenance and evolution. They will also support planetary defense and help fill in knowledge gaps as NASA moves forward with its plans for human exploration of the Moon and Mars, according to the space agency.

Executive Comment

“SDL is honored to be a part of this exciting mission under the leadership of Dr. Scheeres that will provide scientists with unprecedented information from small spacecraft about the workings of our solar system. Janus will add valuable insight on communication systems for future SmallSat deep-space programs,” said Tim Neilsen, SDL’s Iris program manager for the Janus mission. “SDL will build upon the flight-proven heritage of Iris radios and our decades-long legacy collaborating with NASA to ensure mission success.”

Benchmark Space Systems has concluded a permanent licensing partnership to integrate Tesseract Space intellectual property, assets, and staff to elevate Benchmark’s major expansion in the development, deployment and support of its exclusively non-toxic chemical propulsion solutions for global rideshare markets.

Both Benchmark and Tesseract were founded in 2017 on green propulsion technologies designed to safely and quickly deliver small rideshare satellites the last leg of their space journey to an allotted orbital location, often in hours versus weeks using electric propulsion. Benchmark’s non-toxic propulsion solutions offer as much as one-thousand times the thrust of electric systems.

By integrating Tesseract’s intellectual property, expertise, proven test capabilities and product set into its expanding line of end-to-end solutions, Benchmark is more agile in meeting ever-changing market demands with a breadth of green, launch vehicle agnostic thrusters and services supporting 1U CubeSats through ESPA-class (1-to-500kg small satellites), large lunar landers, and orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs).

Benchmark has already won government and commercial contracts on the heels of the agreement, with its new Halcyon propulsion system – a 1 newton thruster in rapid development to debut aboard two smallsats scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in December.

Benchmark will also demonstrate its Starling thruster (formerly DFAST) aboard a 3U small satellite set to liftoff with Firefly Aerospace on the inaugural Alpha flight in October. Starling is scalable from 3U to 24U satellites and features a patented On-Demand Pressurization System (ODPS) to lower launch risks and integration, handling and range safety costs.

Executive Comments

“This permanent partnership has Benchmark Space Systems extremely well positioned to help lead the emerging small satellite rideshare era, with innovative and affordable non-toxic propulsion solutions aimed at driving value in space by dramatically cutting costs, risk and time to orbit,” said Ryan McDevitt, Benchmark Space Systems CEO. “Benchmark has the financial strength, unsurpassed experience with 20 employees keenly focused on small satellite propulsion, offices on both coasts, a robust supply chain and new manufacturing facilities to empower our long-term commitment to new space initiatives and innovations across the small satellite market.”

“Getting into orbit quickly, affordably and safely is the top priority for small satellite missions looking to start generating revenue within days, not months of their launch into space. Benchmark Space Systems has the leading-edge non-toxic chemical propulsion and support solutions to make that happen,” said Erik Franks, Tesseract Co-Founder who now joins Benchmark’s leadership team. “Rideshare and OTV competition is a huge catalyst for propulsion market growth, and Benchmark is well ahead of the curve with required green solutions that far exceed the performance of electric propulsion.”