spacenews.com/phase-four-wins-nasa-and-commercial-deals-for-electric-propulsion-system/Its nice to see this propulsion system fly, I've been following them for years, see earlier posts on CAT thruster.
The AAReST mission has been developed to meet the goals and objectives above. The satellite is a primefocus design (1.2 m focal length, 0.3°field-of-view) with the primary mirror divided up into a sparse apertureconsisting of an arrangement of 10 cm diameter circular mirrors. The primary mirror segments are attached toa cluster of CubeSats, two of which are able to undock from the cluster and navigate independently. Thetelescope would launch as a small secondary payload in a stowed state. The stowed volume of the telescope isapproximately 0.3 m x 0.4 m x 0.5 m. After separation from the primary payload, the telescope would deploy itscamera package at the end of a 1.2 m long hinged composite boom to the focus of the mirror array.Using wavefront sensors, the deformable mirrors would be adjusted and calibrated in order tominimize the size of the mirrors’ individual point spread function (PSF). The mirrors would not be co-phaseddown to subwavelength levels, as would be required for a more advanced science mission, as this would requirean additional metrology system that is prohibitively expensive for a small mission such as this. Instead, imageswould be taken to demonstrate the ability of the mirrors to self-correct their shape, as well as the ability to repointand correct the individual PSFs.Once the initial calibration and imaging demonstration is completed, two of the mirror segments, whichare carried by independent CubeSats, would detach from the mirror cluster and then re-dock to the cluster in adifferent configuration. This would demonstrate on-orbit assembly of the mirror segments. Once the cluster isreassembled, the mirror calibration and imaging would be performed again in order to show the capability ofcalibration in two mirror configurations.
Smallsats and cubesats for planetary missions BLEO.www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/tiny-spacecraft-are-breaking-out-earth-s-orbit
Quote from: TrevorMonty on 08/27/2018 08:24 amSmallsats and cubesats for planetary missions BLEO.www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/tiny-spacecraft-are-breaking-out-earth-s-orbitWe just presented our paper (mentioned in the depot thread in this NSF category) on using micro depots to enable smallsat launch vehicles to do dedicated deep space launch. I'll link to the article and the writeup in another thread once we've put our finishing touches on it, but it's relevant to this planetary/BLEO smallsats discussion--we were getting results suggesting you could use a LauncherOne (refueled on-orbit with a dry-launched/LEO-fueled storable biprop kick stage) to send an 90-450kg net payload almost anywhere in the inner solar system, out to Jupiter.~Jon