News

A New Documentation Process to Streamline Range Safety Procedures

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of Department of Defense (DoD), NASA and commercial auxiliary payloads at the Air Force’s Eastern and Western spacelift ranges.  The range safety documentation process is extremely thorough, but it was never designed for this significant increase in small satellites and auxiliary payloads launches.  Although it…

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Creating Situational Awareness with Spacecraft Data Trending and Monitoring

Data trending and monitoring are crucial in the spacecraft operations for maintaining the spacecraft health and safety and for evaluating the system performance and accuracy. The existing trend and data monitoring approaches are insufficient for time-dependent datasets. The monitoring of these datasets would be very difficult if not possible without a time-dependent trend being established,…

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Cryogenic and Hypergolic Fuel & Oxidizer Sealing in Launch Vehicles

Liquid propulsion system in launch vehicles can be based on either cryogenic or hypergolic fluids. Sealing these fluids in pressurized conditions is very challenging. In cryogenic propulsion system, some fuels and oxidizers (e.g., liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen) are stored in storage tanks well below cryogenic temperatures (-238°F/-150°C) all the way down to -424°F/-253°C. Conventional…

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Effects of Changing Economics on Space Architecture and Engineering

Driven by favorable economics and evolving technologies, the pace of change in the global space industry is due to increase even beyond recent developments.  For example, only a few of the new Earth-imaging constellations have begun to operate and none are close to full deployment.  Many more imaging satellites will be deployed in the next few years.  The…

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Establishing a Launch facility for small satellites at Esrange, Sweden

Nano and microsatellites, including Cubesats and even minisatellites are today mainly launched as piggyback payloads with very limited opportunities for choosing orbit or even knowing in which orbit the satellite will be placed. As the satellites and their applications get more sophisticated, the need to launch them into carefully designed orbits has arisen. There is…

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Force Limited Vibration Testing of CubeSats

Due to the high cost, long development times, and uniqueness of satellites, it has become imperative to implement techniques that ensure their safety during vibration qualification testing. Force Limited Vibration is used to limit the reaction force between the shaker and unit under test. The use of piezoelectric, 3-component force sensors facilitates easy and accurate…

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Simulation-Centric Model-Based Development for Spacecraft and Small Launch Vehicles

Model-Based Development (MBD) is posed as an integrated end-to-end simulation-driven and code-generation-based process for developing complex systems that are composed of sensors, actuators, software, and functional payloads. Spacecraft and Launch Vehicles provide good examples of such systems, therefore these systems are featured in this paper to illustrate the range of functionality and complexity that can…

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