Tag Archives: CubeSat

First carbon nanotube mirrors for Cubesat telescope

A July 12, 2016 news item on phys.org describes a project that could lead to the first carbon nanotube mirrors to be used in a Cubesat telescope in space,

A lightweight telescope that a team of NASA scientists and engineers is developing specifically for CubeSat scientific investigations could become the first to carry a mirror made of carbon nanotubes in an epoxy resin.

Led by Theodor Kostiuk, a scientist at NASA’s [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the technology-development effort is aimed at giving the scientific community a compact, reproducible, and relatively inexpensive telescope that would fit easily inside a CubeSat. Individual CubeSats measure four inches on a side.

John Kolasinski (left), Ted Kostiuk (center), and Tilak Hewagama (right) hold mirrors made of carbon nanotubes in an epoxy resin. The mirror is being tested for potential use in a lightweight telescope specifically for CubeSat scientific investigations. Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

John Kolasinski (left), Ted Kostiuk (center), and Tilak Hewagama (right) hold mirrors made of carbon nanotubes in an epoxy resin. The mirror is being tested for potential use in a lightweight telescope specifically for CubeSat scientific investigations. Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

A July 12, 2016 US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) news release, which originated the news item, provides more information about Cubesats,

Small satellites, including CubeSats, are playing an increasingly larger role in exploration, technology demonstration, scientific research and educational investigations at NASA. These miniature satellites provide a low-cost platform for NASA missions, including planetary space exploration; Earth observations; fundamental Earth and space science; and developing precursor science instruments like cutting-edge laser communications, satellite-to-satellite communications and autonomous movement capabilities. They also allow an inexpensive means to engage students in all phases of satellite development, operation and exploitation through real-world, hands-on research and development experience on NASA-funded rideshare launch opportunities.

Under this particular R&D effort, Kostiuk’s team seeks to develop a CubeSat telescope that would be sensitive to the ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelength bands. It would be equipped with commercial-off-the-shelf spectrometers and imagers and would be ideal as an “exploratory tool for quick looks that could lead to larger missions,” Kostiuk explained. “We’re trying to exploit commercially available components.”

While the concept won’t get the same scientific return as say a flagship-style mission or a large, ground-based telescope, it could enable first order of scientific investigations or be flown as a constellation of similarly equipped CubeSats, added Kostiuk.

With funding from Goddard’s Internal Research and Development program, the team has created a laboratory optical bench made up of three commercially available, miniaturized spectrometers optimized for the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelength bands. The spectrometers are connected via fiber optic cables to the focused beam of a three-inch diameter carbon-nanotube mirror. The team is using the optical bench to test the telescope’s overall design.

The news release then describes the carbon nanotube mirrors,

By all accounts, the new-fangled mirror could prove central to creating a low-cost space telescope for a range of CubeSat scientific investigations.

Unlike most telescope mirrors made of glass or aluminum, this particular optic is made of carbon nanotubes embedded in an epoxy resin. Sub-micron-size, cylindrically shaped, carbon nanotubes exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat. Owing to these unusual properties, the material is valuable to nanotechnology, electronics, optics, and other fields of materials science, and, as a consequence, are being used as additives in various structural materials.

“No one has been able to make a mirror using a carbon-nanotube resin,” said Peter Chen, a Goddard contractor and president of Lightweight Telescopes, Inc., a Columbia, Maryland-based company working with the team to create the CubeSat-compatible telescope.

“This is a unique technology currently available only at Goddard,” he continued. “The technology is too new to fly in space, and first must go through the various levels of technological advancement. But this is what my Goddard colleagues (Kostiuk, Tilak Hewagama, and John Kolasinski) are trying to accomplish through the CubeSat program.”

The use of a carbon-nanotube optic in a CubeSat telescope offers a number of advantages, said Hewagama, who contacted Chen upon learning of a NASA Small Business Innovative Research program awarded to Chen’s company to further advance the mirror technology. In addition to being lightweight, highly stable, and easily reproducible, carbon-nanotube mirrors do not require polishing — a time-consuming and often times expensive process typically required to assure a smooth, perfectly shaped mirror, said Kolasinski, an engineer and science collaborator on the project.

To make a mirror, technicians simply pour the mixture of epoxy and carbon nanotubes into a mandrel or mold fashioned to meet a particular optical prescription. They then heat the mold to to cure and harden the epoxy. Once set, the mirror then is coated with a reflective material of aluminum and silicon dioxide.

“After making a specific mandrel or mold, many tens of identical low-mass, highly uniform replicas can be produced at low cost,” Chen said. “Complete telescope assemblies can be made this way, which is the team’s main interest. For the CubeSat program, this capability will enable many spacecraft to be equipped with identical optics and different detectors for a variety of experiments. They also can be flown in swarms and constellations.”

There could be other applications for these carbon nanotube mirrors according to the news release,

A CubeSat telescope is one possible application for the optics technology, Chen added.

He believes it also would work for larger telescopes, particularly those comprised of multiple mirror segments. Eighteen hexagonal-shape mirrors, for example, form the James Webb Space Telescope’s 21-foot primary mirror and each of the twin telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, contain 36 segments to form a 32-foot mirror.

Many of the mirror segments in these telescopes are identical and can therefore be produced using a single mandrel. This approach avoids the need to grind and polish many individual segments to the same shape and focal length, thus potentially leading to significant savings in schedule and cost.

Moreover, carbon-nanotube mirrors can be made into ‘smart optics’. To maintain a single perfect focus in the Keck telescopes, for example, each mirror segment has several externally mounted actuators that deform the mirrors into the specific shapes required at different telescope orientations.

In the case of carbon-nanotube mirrors, the actuators can be formed into the optics at the time of fabrication. This is accomplished by applying electric fields to the resin mixture before cure, which leads to the formation of carbon-nanotube chains and networks. After curing, technicians then apply power to the mirror, thereby changing the shape of the optical surface. This concept has already been proven in the laboratory.

“This technology can potentially enable very large-area technically active optics in space,” Chen said. “Applications address everything from astronomy and Earth observing to deep-space communications.”

Dexter Johnson provides some additional tidbits in his July 14, 2016 post (on his Nanoclast blog on the IEEE [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers] about the Cubesat mirrors.

Canada’s ‘nano’satellites to gaze upon luminous stars

The launch (from Yasny, Russia) of two car battery-sized satellites happened on June 18, 2014 at 15:11:11 Eastern Daylight Time according to a June 18, 2014 University of Montreal (Université de Montréal) news release (also on EurekAlert).

Together, the satellites are known as the BRITE-Constellation, standing for BRIght Target Explorer. “BRITE-Constellation will monitor for long stretches of time the brightness and colour variations of most of the brightest stars visible to the eye in the night sky. These stars include some of the most massive and luminous stars in the Galaxy, many of which are precursors to supernova explosions. This project will contribute to unprecedented advances in our understanding of such stars and the life cycles of the current and future generations of stars,” said Professor Moffat [Anthony Moffat, of the University of Montreal and the Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec], who is the scientific mission lead for the Canadian contribution to BRITE and current chair of the international executive science team.

Here’s what the satellites (BRITE-Constellatio) are looking for (from the news release),

Luminous stars dominate the ecology of the Universe. “During their relatively brief lives, massive luminous stars gradually eject enriched gas into the interstellar medium, adding heavy elements critical to the formation of future stars, terrestrial planets and organics. In their spectacular deaths as supernova explosions, massive stars violently inject even more crucial ingredients into the mix. The first generation of massive stars in the history of the Universe may have laid the imprint for all future stellar history,” Moffat explained. “Yet, massive stars – rapidly spinning and with radiation fields whose pressure resists gravity itself – are arguably the least understood, despite being the brightest members of the familiar constellations of the night sky.” Other less-massive stars, including stars similar to our own Sun, also contribute to the ecology of the Universe, but only at the end of their lives, when they brighten by factors of a thousand and shed off their tenuous outer layers.

BRITE-Constellation is both a multinational effort and a Canadian bi-provincial effort,

BRITE-Constellation is in fact a multinational effort that relies on pioneering Canadian space technology and a partnership with Austrian and Polish space researchers – the three countries act as equal partners. Canada’s participation was made possible thanks to an investment of $4.07 million by the Canadian Space Agency. The two new Canadian satellites are joining two Austrian satellites and a Polish satellite already in orbit; the final Polish satellite will be launched in August [2014?].

All six satellites were designed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies – Space Flight Laboratory, who also built the Canadian pair. The satellites were in fact named “BRITE Toronto” and “BRITE Montreal” after the University of Toronto and the University of Montreal, who play a major role in the mission.  “BRITE-Constellation will exploit and enhance recent Canadian advances in precise attitude control that have opened up for space science  the domain of very low cost, miniature spacecraft, allowing a scientific return that otherwise would have had price tags 10 to 100 times higher,” Moffat said. “This will actually be the first network of satellites devoted to a fundamental problem in astrophysics.”

Is it my imagination or is there a lot more Canada/Canadian being included in news releases from the academic community these days? In fact, I made a similar comment in my June 10, 2014 posting about TRIUMF, Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics where I noted we might not need to honk our own horns quite so loudly.

One final comment, ‘nano’satellites have been launched before as per my Aug. 6, 2012 posting,

The nanosatellites referred to in the Aug.2, 2012 news release on EurekALert aren’t strictly speaking nano since they are measured in inches and weigh approximately eight pounds. I guess by comparison with a standard-sized satellite, CINEMA, one of 11 CubeSats, seems nano-sized. From the news release,

Eleven tiny satellites called CubeSats will accompany a spy satellite into Earth orbit on Friday, Aug. 3, inaugurating a new type of inexpensive, modular nanosatellite designed to piggyback aboard other NASA missions. [emphasis mine]

One of the 11 will be CINEMA (CubeSat for Ions, Neutrals, Electrons, & MAgnetic fields), an 8-pound, shoebox-sized package which was built over a period of three years by 45 students from the University of California, Berkeley, Kyung Hee University in Korea, Imperial College London, Inter-American University of Puerto Rico, and University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.

This 2012 project had a very different focus from this Austrian-Canadian-Polish effort. From the University of Montreal news release,

The nanosatellites will be able to explore a wide range of astrophysical questions. “The constellation could detect exoplanetary transits around other stars, putting our own planetary system in context, or the pulsations of red giants, which will enable us to test and refine our models regarding the eventual fate of our Sun,” Moffatt explained.

Good luck!

CINEMA; a ‘nano’satellite launched Aug. 3, 2012

I realize most eyes are on Mars and the Rover Curiosity but there are other launches also taking place.

The nanosatellites referred to in the Aug.2, 2012 news release on EurekALert aren’t strictly speaking nano since they are measured in inches and weigh approximately eight pounds. I guess by comparison with a standard-sized satellite, CINEMA, one of 11 CubeSats, seems nano-sized. From the news release,

Eleven tiny satellites called CubeSats will accompany a spy satellite into Earth orbit on Friday, Aug. 3, inaugurating a new type of inexpensive, modular nanosatellite designed to piggyback aboard other NASA missions.

One of the 11 will be CINEMA (CubeSat for Ions, Neutrals, Electrons, & MAgnetic fields), an 8-pound, shoebox-sized package which was built over a period of three years by 45 students from the University of California, Berkeley, Kyung Hee University in Korea, Imperial College London, Inter-American University of Puerto Rico, and University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.

“This is a new way of doing space research, funded by the National Science Foundation with launch arranged by NASA,” said CINEMA principal investigator Robert Lin, professor emeritus of physics and former director of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “This is our first try, but if everything works, we’re going to get a lot of good science out of this.”

CINEMA will obtain images of the “ring current,” an electrical current that encircles the Earth and which, during large magnetic “space storms,” can blow out power grids on the ground. By next year, CubeSat will be joined by three identical satellites – two launched by Korea and another NASA-launched CubeSat – that together will monitor the 3-dimensional structure of the ring current and warn of dangerous activity.

This is an international effort and according to the lead researcher this work was done on a very small budget ,

For three years, Lin has overseen the construction and testing of CINEMA, aided by 25 UC Berkeley science and engineering undergraduates and graduate students. For two summers and winter vacations, about 10 students from Korea came to SSL to assist, while 8 students from Puerto Rico came to Berkeley to help with the engineering.

“There is more risk with these projects, because we use off-the-shelf products, 90 percent of the work is done by students, and the parts are not radiation-hard,” he said. “But it is cheaper and has the latest hardware. I will be very impressed if it lasts more than a year in orbit.”

There was mention of a spy satellite and of the CubeSat’s physical dimensions,

CINEMA is one of five university-built CubeSats aboard the Atlas V rocket; the other six are military or commercial. The main payload is NROL-36, a classified satellite commissioned by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

NASA’s CubeSat Launch initiative provides an opportunity for small satellite payloads to fly as auxiliary payloads on previously planned missions. The nanosatellites are made of cubes that are approximately four inches on a side, have a volume of about one quart, weigh about two pounds, and are meant to be grouped in twos or threes for a particular satellite. CINEMA, for example, is comprised of three cubes. Some two dozen CubeSats are built or under construction at universities alone, and these 11 are the first to go into orbit.

I must have old-fashioned notions about spying. If I were going to send up a spy satellite, I wouldn’t tell anyone.