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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Concepts for Project Galaxy
Project Galaxy will build an astronautical and astronomical simulator that will enable simulation pilots to explore all major celestial bodies in the solar system, and an increasing number of objects in the galaxy.
A Comprehensive Orbit Reconstruction for the Galileo Prime Mission in the J2000 System
The Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter in December of 1995 to begin an orbital tour of the Jovian system. The objective of the tour was the up close study of the planet, its satellites, and its magnetosphere.
Cubesat Deployment from a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit
Satellites deployed from the Gateway in a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) must be safely delivered their desired destinations in cislunar space and beyond. The presence of simultaneously significant gravitational forces from the Moon, the Earth, and the Sun, along with the absence of atmospheric drag, complicates the mission design problem for cubesats deployed from the Gateway. The current investigation defines candidate green zones for safe satellite deployment, allowing a passive departing spacecraft to avoid recontact with the Gateway as it departs the NRHO vicinity.
ACS3 - Flight Dynamics for A Solar Sail Technology Demonstration Mission
The NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) mission consist of a spacecraft that will deploy an 80 m 2 solar sail in a 1000 km sun-synchronous orbit. The main objective of the mission is to demonstrate that the solar wind can impulse the spacecraft to change the semimajor-axis and obtain a different orbit altitude. The sail will be composed of a combination of composite materials with distinct properties, and it will be deployed with lightweight booms from a 12U CubeSat bus, developed by Nanoavionics. The spacecraft will be launched aboard an Electron launch vehicle from Rocket LAB Launch Complex in New Zealand no earlier than July 2023. This paper covers the orbital mechanics and navigation developments to support the mission, from the solar sail trajectory model to the actual flight dynamics system to provide the orbit determination analysis prior to flight. First, we introduce a description of our high-fidelity propagation that accounts for the solar radiation pressure to produce predictive ephemeris of the solar sail performance with several spacecraft attitude modes. As part of our results, we present plots of the expected altitudes achieved by the spacecraft once the solar sail is deployed under various assumptions of the solar weather. In addition to that, we present a full description of our orbit determination process which relies in GPS state vectors to accurately estimate the position and velocity uncertainties at a frequent cadence during the mission. The outcome of this process will be critical to achieving the objective of determining effective altitude change produced by the solar sail.
BioSentinel
Develop a deep space tool with autonomous life support technologies to study the biological effects of the space radiation environment.
Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference 2023 - Biosentinel
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Flight Dynamics and Navigation Performance of the BioSentinel Mission
BioSentinel was one of ten CubeSats launched by the Space Launch System (SLS) as part of the Artemis I campaign on 16 November 2022. A lunar flyby gave BioSentinel the needed energy to escape the Earth-Moon system into heliocentric space. The biological payload contains yeast cells designed to measure radiation in deep space beyond the reach of Earth’s magnetosphere. This paper discusses in detail the BioSentinel flight performance, as well as challenges and lessons learned prior to, and during the mission.
Flight Dynamics and Navigation Performance of the BioSentinel Mission
BioSentinel was one of the ten 6U CubeSats launched by the Space Launch System (SLS) as part of the Artemis-I mission on November 16th, 2022. The spacecraft was deployed after the trans-lunar injection imparted by the upper stage of SLS, and performed a lunar flyby that provided the necessary energy to escape the Earth-Moon system into heliocentric space. The BioSentinel mission required flight dynamics support prior to flight to assess the deployment conditions and the trajectory design, as well as navigation support during flight, to provide orbit determination solutions for the mission and the Deep Space Network (DSN). This paper discusses the BioSentinel mission flight dynamics campaign, from mission design to the challenges and lessons learned encountered during flight.
Flight Dynamics and Navigation Performance of the BioSentinel Mission
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Deep Space navigation for the BioSentinel spacecraft science orbit
BioSentinel is an astrobiology small spacecraft mission. The payload consists of two parts, the first has optical and microfluidics sensors, and the second is a Linear Energy Transfer spectrometer that has the objective to measure deep space radiation from events such as coronal mass ejections. The goal of the mission is to observe potential DNA damage due to the radiation in heliocentric space on the living organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a budding yeast. Two types of this living organism are included in the payload. The first is a natural type that is more radiation tolerant, while the second is a mutant strain that has a deficiency in a gene that allows DNA repair once damage occurs. The impact caused by the radiation on the DNA is compared to an identical sample aboard the International Space Station, as well as another identical sample at a laboratory on the ground. The BioSentinel mission consists of a 6U CubeSat currently ,as of January 2024, active in heliocentric orbit. The spacecraft was launched aboard the first SLS flight as part of the Artemis-I campaign in November 2022. After successful deployment from the launch vehicle, it performed a lunar flyby with an altitude of 406 km. The delta-V imparted by the flyby provided the necessary energy to achieve a heliocentric orbit, in an Earth-trailing pattern. The navigation analysis consisted of a Kalman-filter that utilized data from the Deep Space Network and the ESA Estrack network. All those antennas were needed since the Artemis-1 campaign included the deployment of several other cubesats, therefore the scheduling process required more antenna assets than usual due to simultaneous demands from various missions. The processed tracking data was later also refined with a smoother in order to obtain a more accurate solution. The type of tracking data included TCP, Sequential Range, Doppler and Range formats. The solar radiation pressure coefficient, as well as the delta-V from the deployment and the flyby were modeled to obtain suitable solutions that could decrease the position and velocity uncertainties at several steps along the mission concept of operations. The final product each time resulted in updated ephemeris files that were used by the mission and the antenna networks as the mission progressed. Once in the final science orbit, the utilized antennas are only from the DSN network and the data format is bounded to just TCP. Regular orbit determination is performed, every two weeks. The spacecraft is in a nominal well-known orbit, performing regular operations. This paper includes an analysis of the final science orbit, the techniques and procedures utilized to perform orbit determination and a description of the overall navigation campaign produced during the mission and, more specifically, during the final science operations in Deep Space.
Abort Trajectory Design Strategies for the Artemis Missions
NASA's Artemis campaign plans to send astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The campaign relies on the Orion crew capsule to ferry the crew from Earth to an L2 9:2 lunar synodic resonant Near-Rectlinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) before descent to the lunar surface. This investigation examines a process to construct various abort families during transit from Earth to the NRHO using the Earth-Moon Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP). The initial trajectories are constructed using the CR3BP and categorized in families. A process is then summarized to transcribe and converge trajectories from the CR3BP into a higher-fidelity model. Ultimately, an effective methodology to develop, classify and converge these aborts in higher-fidelity is critical to the Artemis program in the event of an anomaly during the crew transit.
Recovery from Missed Thrust During Gateway's NRHO Insertion Using Auxiliary Propulsion
Results are presented by which a high thrust reaction control system (RCS) can be used to complete insertion of the Gateway into a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) in the event of a missed thrust event (MTE).Recovery solutions are presented in terms of the response time afforded, the ∆v required, and the NRHO insertion delay relative to the reference trajectory. Results are presented for methodologies that maintain the reference trajectory NRHO insertion epoch as well as those that optimize this insertion epoch in order to buy down recovery costs and increase the robustness of solutions. This analysis presents solutions which, in the event of an MTE during NRHO insertion, enable RCS recoveries that require under 20 m/s ∆v and less than four days of NRHO insertion delay.