When ESA’s planned Hera mission journeys to its target binary asteroid system, it will not be alone.

The spacecraft will carry two tiny cubesats for deployment around — and eventual landing on — the Didymos asteroids. Each companion spacecraft will be small enough to fit inside a briefcase, as compared to the desk-sized Hera.

ESA’s Hera mission artistic concept, currently under study, would be humanity’s first mission to a binary asteroid: the 800 m-diameter Didymos is accompanied by a 170 m-diameter secondary body. Hera will study the aftermath of the impact caused by the NASA spacecraft DART on the smaller body.

Image is courtesy of the ESA Science Office.

Hera has room to deliver two ‘six-unit’ smallsat missions to the Didymos asteroid system — a 780 meter-diameter, mountain-sized main body that is orbited by a 160 meter moon, informally called ‘Didymoon,’ about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Hera mission received proposals for cubesats from across Europe and an evaluation board has now made the final selection.

The first cubesat companion is called the Asteroid Prospection Explorer (APEX), and was developed by a Swedish/Finnish/Czech/German consortium. It will perform detailed spectral measurements of both asteroids’ surfaces — measuring the sunlight reflected by Didymos and breaking down its various colors to discover how these asteroids have interacted with the space environment, pinpointing any differences in composition between the two. In addition, APEX will make magnetic readings that will give insight into their interior structure of these bodies. Guided by a navigation camera and a ‘laser radar’ (lidar) instrument, APEX will also make a landing on one of the asteroids, gathering valuable data in the process using inertial sensors, and going on to perform close-up observations of the asteroid’s surface material.

The other cubesat is called Juventas, developed by Danish company GomSpace and GMV in Romania, and will measure the gravity field as well as the internal structure of the smaller of the two Didymos asteroids. In close orbit around Didymoon, Juventas will line up with Hera to perform satellite-to-satellite radio-science experiments and carry out a low-frequency radar survey of the asteroid interior, similar to performing a detailed ‘X-ray scan’ of Didymoon to unveil its interior. The adventure will end with a landing, using the dynamics of any likely bouncing to capture details of the asteroid’s surface material — followed by several days of surface operations.

The Asteroid Prospection Explorer (or ‘APEX’) cubesat to accompany the Hera mission to the Didymos binary asteroid system.

Photo is courtesy of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics.

Artistic rendition of Juventas, the 6U xubesat developed as a ‘daughter’ to the Hera mothership.

Image is courtesy of GomSpace.

Hera is set to be humankind’s first mission to a binary asteroid system. As well as testing technologies in deep space and gathering crucial science data, Hera is designed to be Europe’s contribution to an international planetary defense effort: it would survey the crater and measure orbital deviation of Didymoon caused by the earlier collision of a NASA probe, called DART. This unique experiment will validate the asteroid deflection technique referred to as kinetic impactor, enabling humankind to protect our planet from asteroid impacts.

Next, the two cubesats will have their designs refined and interfaces with their mothership finalized, in line with continuing design work on the Hera mission itself, which will be presented to ESA’s Space19+ meeting towards the end of this year, where Europe’s space ministers will take a final decision on flying the mission.

Executive Comments

Hera manager Ian Carnelli  explained that the company is very happy to have these high-quality cubesat missions join with the firm to perform additional bonus science alongside their Hera mothership. Carrying added instruments and venturing much closer to the target bodies, they will give different perspectives and complementary investigations on this exotic binary asteroid. They will also give the company valuable experience of close proximity operations relayed by the Hera mothercraft in extreme low-gravity conditions. This will be very valuable to many future missions.

Paolo Martino, Hera spacecraft lead engineer, added that the idea of building cubesats for deep space is relatively new, but was recently validated by NASA’s InSight landing on Mars last November, when a pair of accompanying cubesats succeeded in relaying the lander’s radio signals back to Earth — as well as returning imagery of the Red Planet.

There are more than 3,900 confirmed planets beyond our solar system. Most of them have been detected because of their “transits” — instances when a planet crosses its star, momentarily blocking its light. These dips in starlight can tell astronomers a bit about a planet’s size and its distance from its star. 

But knowing more about the planet, including whether it harbors oxygen, water, and other signs of life, requires far more powerful tools. Ideally, these would be much bigger telescopes in space, with light-gathering mirrors as wide as those of the largest ground observatories. NASA engineers are now developing designs for such next-generation space telescopes, including “segmented” telescopes with multiple small mirrors that could be assembled or unfurled to form one very large telescope once launched into space. 

NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is an example of a segmented primary mirror, with a diameter of 6.5 meters and 18 hexagonal segments. Next-generation space telescopes are expected to be as large as 15 meters, with over 100 mirror segments. 

One challenge for segmented space telescopes is how to keep the mirror segments stable and pointing collectively toward an exoplanetary system. Such telescopes would be equipped with coronagraphs — instruments that are sensitive enough to discern between the light given off by a star and the considerably weaker light emitted by an orbiting planet. But the slightest shift in any of the telescope’s parts could throw off a coronagraph’s measurements and disrupt measurements of oxygen, water, or other planetary features. 

Now MIT engineers propose that a second, shoebox-sized spacecraft equipped with a simple laser could fly at a distance from the large space telescope and act as a “guide star,” providing a steady, bright light near the target system that the telescope could use as a reference point in space to keep itself stable. 

In the coming decades, massive segmented space telescopes may be launched to peer even closer in on far-out exoplanets and their atmospheres. To keep these mega-scopes stable, MIT researchers say that small satellites can follow along, and act as “guide stars,” by pointing a laser back at a telescope to calibrate the system, to produce better, more accurate images of distant worlds. Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT

In a paper published today in the Astronomical Journal, the researchers show that the design of such a laser guide star would be feasible with today’s existing technology. The researchers say that using the laser light from the second spacecraft to stabilize the system relaxes the demand for precision in a large segmented telescope, saving time and money, and allowing for more flexible telescope designs. 

“This paper suggests that in the future, we might be able to build a telescope that’s a little floppier, a little less intrinsically stable, but could use a bright source as a reference to maintain its stability,” says Ewan Douglas, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a lead author on the paper. 

The paper also includes Kerri Cahoy, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, along with graduate students James Clark and Weston Marlow at MIT, and Jared Males, Olivier Guyon, and Jennifer Lumbres from the University of Arizona. 

In the crosshairs

For over a century, astronomers have been using actual stars as “guides” to stabilize ground-based telescopes. 

“If imperfections in the telescope motor or gears were causing your telescope to track slightly faster or slower, you could watch your guide star on a crosshairs by eye, and slowly keep it centered while you took a long exposure,” Douglas says.

In the 1990s, scientists started using lasers on the ground as artificial guide stars by exciting sodium in the upper atmosphere, pointing the lasers into the sky to create a point of light some 40 miles from the ground. Astronomers could then stabilize a telescope using this light source, which could be generated anywhere the astronomer wanted to point the telescope. 

“Now we’re extending that idea, but rather than pointing a laser from the ground into space, we’re shining it from space, onto a telescope in space,” Douglas says. Ground telescopes need guide stars to counter atmospheric effects, but space telescopes for exoplanet imaging have to counter minute changes in the system temperature and any disturbances due to motion. 

The space-based laser guide star idea arose out of a project that was funded by NASA. The agency has been considering designs for large, segmented telescopes in space and tasked the researchers with finding ways of bringing down the cost of the massive observatories. 

“The reason this is pertinent now is that NASA has to decide in the next couple years whether these large space telescopes will be our priority in the next few decades,” Douglas says. “That decision-making is happening now, just like the decision-making for the Hubble Space Telescope happened in the 1960s, but it didn’t launch until the 1990s.'”

Star fleet

Cahoy’s lab has been developing laser communications for use in CubeSats, which are shoebox-sized satellites that can be built and launched into space at a fraction of the cost of conventional spacecraft. 

For this new study, the researchers looked at whether a laser, integrated into a CubeSat or slightly larger SmallSat, could be used to maintain the stability of a large, segmented space telescope modeled after NASA’s LUVOIR (for Large UV Optical Infrared Surveyor), a conceptual design that includes multiple mirrors that would be assembled in space. 

Researchers have estimated that such a telescope would have to remain perfectly still, within 10 picometers — about a quarter the diameter of a hydrogen atom — in order for an onboard coronagraph to take accurate measurements of a planet’s light, apart from its star. 

“Any disturbance on the spacecraft, like a slight change in the angle of the sun, or a piece of electronics turning on and off and changing the amount of heat dissipated across the spacecraft, will cause slight expansion or contraction of the structure,” Douglas says. “If you get disturbances bigger than around 10 picometers, you start seeing a change in the pattern of starlight inside the telescope, and the changes mean that you can’t perfectly subtract the starlight to see the planet’s reflected light.”

The team came up with a general design for a laser guide star that would be far enough away from a telescope to be seen as a fixed star — about tens of thousands of miles away — and that would point back and send its light toward the telescope’s mirrors, each of which would reflect the laser light toward an onboard camera. That camera would measure the phase of this reflected light over time. Any change of 10 picometers or more would signal a compromise to the telescope’s stability that, onboard actuators could then quickly correct. 

To see if such a laser guide star design would be feasible with today’s laser technology, Douglas and Cahoy worked with colleagues at the University of Arizona to come up with different brightness sources, to figure out, for instance, how bright a laser would have to be to provide a certain amount of information about a telescope’s position, or to provide stability using models of segment stability from large space telescopes. They then drew up a set of existing laser transmitters and calculated how stable, strong, and far away each laser would have to be from the telescope to act as a reliable guide star. 

In general, they found laser guide star designs are feasible with existing technologies, and that the system could fit entirely within a SmallSat about the size of a cubic foot. Douglas says that a single guide star could conceivably follow a telescope’s “gaze,” traveling from one star to the next as the telescope switches its observation targets. However, this would require the smaller spacecraft to journey hundreds of thousands of miles paired with the telescope at a distance, as the telescope repositions itself to look at different stars. 

Instead, Douglas says a small fleet of guide stars could be deployed, affordably, and spaced across the sky, to help stabilize a telescope as it surveys multiple exoplanetary systems. Cahoy points out that the recent success of NASA’s MARCO CubeSats, which supported the Mars Insight lander as a communications relay, demonstrates that CubeSats with propulsion systems can work in interplanetary space, for longer durations and at large distances. 

“Now we’re analyzing existing propulsion systems and figuring out the optimal way to do this, and how many spacecraft we’d want leapfrogging each other in space,” Douglas says. “Ultimately, we think this is a way to bring down the cost of these large, segmented space telescopes.” 

by Jennifer Chu for MIT News ###

This research was funded in part by a NASA Early Stage Innovation Award. 

Related links

PAPER: “Laser guide star for large segmented-aperture space telescopes, part 1: Implications for terrestrial exoplanet detection and observatory stability.” http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aaf385/meta

ARCHIVE: Laser-pointing system could help tiny satellites transmit data to Earth http://news.mit.edu/2018/laser-pointing-system-satellites-transmit-data-1214

ARCHIVE: E.T., we’re home http://news.mit.edu/2018/laser-attract-alien-astronomers-study-1105

ARCHIVE: For collecting weather data, tiny satellites measure up to billion-dollar cousins http://news.mit.edu/2018/for-collecting-weather-data-cubesats-measure-up-0927

ARCHIVE: Space junk: The cluttered frontier http://news.mit.edu/2017/space-junk-shards-teflon-0619

Constellations of nano-satellites can produce high-resolution images for less money, according to new research. The imaging techniques developed by scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel could also be used to improve the observations of ground-telescope arrays.

The new imaging technique could make high-resolution space-based photography less cost prohibitive. Photo by BGU

“This is an invention that completely changes the costs of space exploration, astronomy, aerial photography, and more,” Angika Bulbul, a BGU Ph.D. candidate, said in a news release.

As revealed by the new study, published in the journal Optica, groups of small satellites the size of milk cartons, when arranged in a ring shape, can focus light onto another imaging satellite, producing images rivaling those captured by large telescopes and their full-frame, lens-based or concave mirror systems.

“Several previous assumptions about long-range photography were incorrect,” Bulbul said. “We found that you only need a small part of a telescope lens to obtain quality images.”

Researchers were able to capture high-resolution images using only a tiny fraction of a full lens on each nano-satellite model.

“Consequently, we can slash the huge cost, time and material needed for gigantic traditional optical space telescopes with large curved mirrors,” Bulbul said.

Researchers didn’t launch any nano-satellites into space for their study. Instead, they build a miniature satellite constellation in their lab. The proof-of-concept tests showed the circular array of sub-apertures yielded image resolution on par with full lens imagery.

The technology could democratize space imagery, as nano-satellites are much cheaper to build and launch.

By Brooks Hays of UPI

One of Swarm Technologies’ “SpaceBee” picosatellites.
Credit: Swarm Technologies

These SpaceBEEs (Basic Electronic Elements) may be tiny picosatellites, but it’s not the size that caused an issue, it’s what the company, Swarm Technologies did, that was unauthorized according to the FCC, that cost the company $900,000.

The FCC has settled an investigation into an alleged unauthorized launch and operation of small satellites by Swarm Technologies. The company agreed to a Consent Decree that included a $900,000 penalty, an extended period of FCC oversight, and a requirement of pre-launch notices to the FCC, among other stipulations.

“We will aggressively enforce the FCC’s requirements that companies seek FCC authorization prior to deploying and operating communications satellites and earth stations,” FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Rosemary Harold said. “These important obligations protect other operators against radio interference and collisions, making space a safer place to operate.”

In April 2017, Swarm applied for an Experimental license to deploy and operate two Earth stations and four tiny 0.25 U CubeSats called SpaceBEEs. The FCC denied Swarm’s application in December 2017 over concerns about the ability to track the satellites. Swarm nevertheless launched the satellites on January 12, 2018, on a vehicle that also carried an Amateur Radio satellite into space. After reports of the unauthorized SpaceBEEs launch surfaced, the FCC launched an investigation last March.

The FCC determined that Swarm had launched the four SpaceBEEs from India and had unlawfully transmitted signals between Earth stations in Georgia and the satellites for more than a week. In addition, the FCC discovered that Swarm had also performed unauthorized weather balloon-to-ground station tests and other unauthorized equipment tests prior to the launch. All these activities required FCC authorization. 

The December resolution requires Swarm to pay a penalty $900,000 to the U.S. Treasury and to submit pre-launch reports to the FCC for the next 3 years. The FCC said Swarm has committed to a strict compliance plan to prevent future FCC rule violations.

The FCC issued an Enforcement Advisory last April to remind satellite operators that they must obtain FCC authorization for space station and Earth station operations. The advisory cautioned satellite operators and launch companies against proceeding with launch arrangements following a license denial or prior to receiving an FCC authorization.

From the National Association for Amateur Radio

HILO — An environmental assessment is being drafted for a proposed small satellite launch facility in East Hawaii.

The Alaska Aerospace Corp. operates the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island and wants to build its next site for launches closer to the equator.

State Senator 
Russell Ruderman

Specifically, it’s looking at land owned by W.H. Shipman near Keaau.

Mark Lester, president of the organization established by the state of Alaska, said he’s aware spaceport proposals have a fraught history on Hawaii Island, where community concerns about safety and environmental impacts have kept them grounded.

The organization is hoping its proposed facility would be small enough to be able to win community support.

“Don’t think of what you see at Cape Canaveral,” he said, noting payloads would be between 50 to 100 kilograms.

“This is really a couple concrete pads with very little permanent infrastructure.”

Craig Campbell, CEO of the corporation, described the site being analyzed in the EA as being east or northeast of the macadamia nut farm. He said the rockets would be 20 feet to 40 feet tall.

They stated the rockets wouldn’t be a daily occurrence, and they think they would be launched far enough away from homes that the noise nuisance wouldn’t be greater than the airport or Hilo dragstrip.

“There would be a short spike for 30 seconds,” Campbell said.

“You will hear it, but it won’t be any louder than the jets that take off from the Hilo airport.”

Ultimately, those issues will be addressed by the EA, which could be ready for public review, including presentations during community meetings, in early 2019.

State Representative 
Mark Nakashima

Lester said they are currently scoping concerns and questions from stakeholders as part of the EA, and don’t want to force the project on the community.

“We’re trying to be realistic in stepping through the process,” he said.

“If one piece of this doesn’t make sense, this process can come to a close,” Lester added.

Proposing to build a rocket launch facility of any type will likely face a skeptical public.

Terri Napeahi, a community activist who lives on a Panaewa farm lot, said she can’t imagine rockets being low impact, no matter how small. She said she is concerned it could be too close to Department of Hawaiian Home Lands properties.

“It’s just going to add to the pile,” Napeahi said, referring to existing impacts to DHHL communities.

Sen. Russell Ruderman, D-Puna, Ka‘u, said he wasn’t aware of the proposal, but he doesn’t think it would be the best use of the land.

“Why don’t we use our land for what people really want?” he asked.

Rep. Mark Nakashima, a supporter of growing aerospace jobs in Hawaii, said the project would help diversify East Hawaii’s economy and could help spur a satellite manufacturing industry here tied to the community colleges.

He said Hawaii Island is a prime spot for small satellite launches since it is relatively close to the equator.

“If it is successful, it would be huge for us,” said Nakashima, D-Hilo, Hamakua.

Sen. Kai Kahele, D-Hilo, said he hadn’t heard the details about the proposal but noted it’s likely not realistic.

“Launching anything from that side of Hawaii Island has never come to fruition,” he said.

Shipman President Peggy Farias said in an email that the company hasn’t made a final decision on hosting the facility.

“Our final decision on whether or not to participate in this project will be dependent on the outcome of the Environmental Assessment process, which is in the very early stages,” she wrote. “We do believe that there are many potential benefits of this proposed project, including educational opportunities for local students.

“At the same time, all of the parties involved agree that the project must also be shaped and informed by careful consideration of environmental and cultural factors as well as community response.”

The state Legislature passed matching funds for the EA three years ago, Nakashima said, before a specific location was identified.
 

By Tom Callis, Hawaii Tribune-Herald

From West Hawaii Today

South Africans celebrated the success of Thursday’s launch of ZACube-2, a two-year project to put its second nanosatellite into orbit with the main purpose of using automatic identification of ships (AIS) technology to monitor its waters.

The ZACube-2 also has near-infrared imaging equipment for detecting forest fires. 

“Science is indeed helping us resolve the challenges of our society. I want to congratulate our space team for great work and this achievement,” said Minister of Science and Technology Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane in a statement on Thursday.

She offered her congratulations to a diverse group of “some of South Africa’s youngest and brightest minds” who developed the project at the French South African Institute of Technology (F’SATI), located at Cape Peninsula University of Technological (CPUT) in Cape Town.

The cube satellite weighs about 3.5 kilograms and has an estimated lifetime in orbit of two years, according to GK Launch Services. That’s a private arm affiliated with Russia’s Roscosmos space program, established to deliver commercial satellite launch services using the Soyuz-2 rockets and Russian locations.

There were 26 contract satellites aboard Thursday’s rocket, including some from Japan, Germany, Spain and the United States. South Africa’s ZACube-2 was launched with them at 5:07 a.m. Moscow time from Vostochny, the fourth time that the service has sent commercial satellites up for clients.

GK Launch Services confirmed the success of the mission and said all satellites had been contacted by Thursday evening. The South African university said ZACube-2 appeared healthy and was responding to commands.

In Africa, countries including Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Morocco also have space programs, while the African Union has introduced an African space policy.

By AT Editor, South African Times Images: GK Launch Services

Deep Space Industries (DSI) has been acquired by Bradford Space, a U.S.-owned company with facilities in the Netherlands and Sweden — the announcement was made on January 1, 2019,  and has been confirmed by a Bradford director, Mr. Ian Fichtenbaum — terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A group of entrepreneurs and space advocates founded DSI in 2012 with a goal of developing technologies for prospecting and eventually extracting space resources, such as water ice, from asteroids. It proposed carrying out those missions using small spacecraft the company planned to develop. More recently, DSI pivoted toward smallsats in general, including the production of a propulsion system called Comet that used water as propellant. The company promoted Comet on that smallsat’s ability to provide performance approaching that of traditional monopropellant systems such as hydrazine, but with a non-toxic propellant that was less expensive and safer to handle.

The ECAPS thruster. Image is courtesy of
Bradford Space.

Bradford Space has its own green propulsion systems for spacecraft, courtesy of the firm’s 2017 acquisition of ECAPS, a Swedish company that developed high-performance, non-toxic, satellite propulsion systems. Fifteen spacecraft are using those ECAPS thrusters, including three launched on December 3, 2018, on a SpaceX Falcon 9. That launch also carried four satellites using Comet thrusters from DSI.

The acquisition of DSI comes a little more than two months after another startup with asteroid mining ambitions, Planetary Resources, was acquired by ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company. The founder of ConsenSys, Joseph Lubin, said in a statement at the time that Planetary Resources fit into its vision of “democratizing and decentralizing space endeavors” but has provided few details on how that would come to fruition.

DSI, which will be rebranded as Bradford Space Inc., or BSI, will continue to work on a satellite bus called Xplorer that is intended for use on missions beyond Earth orbit.

Executive Comment

Director Fichtenbaum said that Bradford sees Comet as a complementary product to its existing ECAPS thrusters. The acquisition will give Bradford a presence in the United States to help sell ECAPS systems and other technologies, as well as a great engineering and production team and customer base. The Bradford infrastructure will also help sales of Comet in Europe and with the company’s pre-existing ECAPS customers. The DSI team provided very innovative solutions to the problem of exploring the solar system at a reasonable cost, and Bradford is eager to see if that can be developed with the help of Bradford technologies. Those technologies include components on ESA’s BepiColombo mission to Mercury launched in October and the JUICE mission to Jupiter under development. For commercial asteroid mining, Bradford does not sneer at its prospects. The company believews it has a real future and want to see if DSI’s Comet and Xplorer as well as Bradford’s existing activities can play a part of that future — for now the firm is taking things step by step.

A series of seven small satellites expected to serve for wildlife protection, field emergency rescue, vehicle and ship monitoring and logistics tracing were launched into space at noon Friday.

A Long March-2D rocket, carrying the satellites called the “ladybeetle series,” together with two satellites for Saudi Arabia and three other small ones, blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 12:12 p.m.

The series include Ladybeetle 1, weighing about 100 kg, three CubeSats composed of six cubic units (10*10*10 cm) and three composed of three cubic units. 

The remainder of this extensive article can be found here at IoT Business News

The GomX-4B — ESA’s largest, small cubesat yet flown — has completed its mission for the Agency, testing out new miniaturized technologies including: inter-satellite link communication with its GomX-4A twin, a hyperspectral imager, star tracker and butane-based propulsion system.

An artistic rendition of the GomX-4 smallsat pair.

Image is courtesy of GomSpace.

ESA is making use of the standardized 10 cm. cubesats for testing new technologies in space. GomX-4B was ESA’s first six-unit cubesat, double the size of its predecessor GomX-3, built for ESA by GomSpace in Aalborg, Denmark, who is also the builder of GomX-4A for the Danish Ministry of Defence. The cubesat pair was launched in February of 2018 from Jiuquan, China.

GomX-4B’s cold-gas thruster system takes up two half-cubesat units at one side of the nanosatellite, with two spherical titanium tanks filled with liquid butane. It has four 1 mN thrusters, typically to be fired in pairs while keeping one set in reserve.

Photo is courtesy of Nanospace.

GomX-4B used its butane cold gas propulsion system to maneuver away from its twin, flying up to 4,500 km. away in a fixed geometry — a limit set by Earth’s curvature and representative of planned smallsat constellation spacing — to test inter-satellite radio links allowing the rapid transfer of data from Earth between satellites and back to Earth again.

Supplied by the Swedish branch of GomSpace, the propulsion system allows the cubesat to adjust its orbital speed in a controlled manner by a total of 10 m/s — a speed equivalent to a kicked football.

In another first, GomX-4B acquired the first hyperspectral images of Earth from a cubesat. Cosine Research in the Netherlands and their partners constructed the hand-sized HyperScout imager for ESA. This divides up the light it receives into many narrow, adjacent wavelengths, gathering a wealth of environmental data. The mission also proved that hyperspectral image processing can be performed aboard, to reduce the amount of data needing to be transmitted down to Earth. High-quality image acquisition requires good pointing accuracy and stability, so GomX-4B also trialed a miniaturized star tracker developed by Dutch cubesat manufacturer ISIS to orient itself by its surrounding starfield, turning itself using fast-spinning reaction wheels. A final experimental payload gathered data on how orbital radiation affects computer memories.

Observing in 45 visible and near-infrared spectral bands, the HyperScout hyperspectral imager was launched in February 2018, aboard ESA’s cereal box-sized GomX-4B smallsat. HyperScout has been developed by cosine Research in the Netherlands.

Photo is courtesy of the company.

The large amount of flight data returned by the mission is being analyzed as a source of lessons learned to guide the development of follow-on smallsat missions, starting with GomX-5 whose 12 unit design begins next month at GomSpace.

The GomX missions are funded primarily by Denmark in the ‘Fly’ element of ESA’s General Support Technology Program to develop and prove leading edge space technologies. ESA has a trio of Technology cubesats from Belgium planned to fly during the new year: Qarman to gather atmospheric reentry data, Simba to monitor Earth’s radiation budget and Picasso to monitor the troposphere and stratosphere.

Executive Comment

Roger Walker, who oversees ESA’s Technology cubesats, said that this multi-faceted mission has performed extremely well in flight. What its results demonstrate is that European cubesats are now ready for operational deployment, as the first generation of cubesat constellations in LEO for a variety of applications. The post-flight review has declared ESA’s in-orbit demonstration mission a success, but in fact GomX-4B’s story is far from over. GomSpace, the manufacturer of the satellite, continues to operate the smallsat, while GomSpace’s subsidiary in Luxembourg will be in charge of mission exploitation. In spite of all the orbital maneuvering, GomX-4B still has a lot of fuel. Of the original 130 grams of butane, only 13 grams were consumed during the mission.

Firefly Aerospace, Inc. (Firefly) has executed a Launch and Brokerage Services Agreement (LBSA) with Spaceflight — through the LBSA, Spaceflight will offer dedicated rideshare launch opportunities on the Firefly Alpha launch vehicle and work with Firefly to manifest excess Alpha capacity.

Executive Comments

Firefly CEO, Dr. Tom Markusic, said that Spaceflight has a proven expertise in payload aggregation and mission management. The firm’s recent SSO-A dedicated rideshare mission set a new standard for complex smallsat aggregation and deployment and was a significant step forward for the entire NewSpace industry.

Curt Blake, Spaceflight CEO, added that with the expanding smallsat market comes the need for more dedicated rideshare missions. The Firefly Alpha 630kg-to-SSO payload capacity is an ideal size for frequent and affordable rideshare opportunities, and we’re looking forward to adding this capacity to our offering to help more organizations get to space.

Les Kovacs, Firefly VP of Business Development, added that this is an exciting time for the space industry. The advanced capabilities offered by the next generation of smallsats will allow novel applications of space-based capabilities. The company’s partnership with Spaceflight will ensure that heritage aerospace companies and NewSpace entrepreneurs have access to the shared resource of LEO and the launch capability required to successfully execute their business plans.