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By NASA
Imagine designing technology that can survive on the Moon for up to a decade, providing a continuous energy supply. NASA selected three companies to develop such systems, aimed at providing a power source at the Moon’s South Pole for Artemis missions.
Three companies were awarded contracts in 2022 with plans to test their self-sustaining solar arrays at the Johnson Space Center’s Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL) in Houston, specifically in Chamber A in building 32. The prototypes tested to date have undergone rigorous evaluations to ensure the technology can withstand the harsh lunar environment and deploy the solar array effectively on the lunar surface.
The Honeybee Robotics prototype during lunar VSAT (Vertical Solar Array Technology) testing inside Chamber A at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.NASA/David DeHoyos The Astrobotic Technology prototype during lunar VSAT testing inside Chamber A at Johnson Space Center. NASA/James Blair In the summer of 2024, both Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company from Altadena, California and Astrobotic Technology from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania put their solar array concepts to the test in Chamber A.
Each company has engineered a unique solution to design the arrays to withstand the harsh lunar environment and extreme temperature swings. The data collected in the SESL will support refinement of requirements and the designs for future technological advancements with the goal to deploy at least one of the systems near the Moon’s South Pole.
The contracts for this initiative are part of NASA’s VSAT (Vertical Solar Array Technology) project, aiming to support the agency’s long-term lunar surface operations. VSAT is under the Space Technology Mission Directorate Game Changing Development program and led by the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in collaboration with Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
“We foresee the Moon as a hub for manufacturing satellites and hardware, leveraging the energy required to launch from the lunar surface,” said Jim Burgess, VSAT lead systems engineer. “This vision could revolutionize space exploration and industry.”
Built in 1965, the SESL initially supported the Gemini and Apollo programs but was adapted to conduct testing for other missions like the Space Shuttle Program and Mars rovers, as well as validate the design of the James Webb Space Telescope. Today, it continues to evolve to support future Artemis exploration.
Johnson’s Front Door initiative aims to solve the challenges of space exploration by opening opportunities to the public and bringing together bold and innovative ideas to explore new destinations.
“The SESL is just one of the hundreds of unique capabilities that we have here at Johnson,” said Molly Bannon, Johnson’s Innovation and Strategy specialist. “The Front Door provides a clear understanding of all our capabilities and services, the ways in which our partners can access them, and how to contact us. We know that we can go further together with all our partners across the entire space ecosystem if we bring everyone together as the hub of human spaceflight.”
Chamber A remains as one of the largest thermal vacuum chambers of its kind, with the unique capability to provide extreme deep space temperature conditions down to as low as 20 Kelvin. This allows engineers to gather essential data on how technologies react to the Moon’s severe conditions, particularly during the frigid lunar night where the systems may need to survive for 96 hours in darkness.
“Testing these prototypes will help ensure more safe and reliable space mission technologies,” said Chuck Taylor, VSAT project manager. “The goal is to create a self-sustaining system that can support lunar exploration and beyond, making our presence on the Moon not just feasible but sustainable.”
The power generation systems must be self-aware to manage outages and ensure survival on the lunar surface. These systems will need to communicate with habitats and rovers and provide continuous power and recharging as needed. They must also deploy on a curved surface, extend 32 feet high to reach sunlight, and retract for possible relocation.
“Generating power on the Moon involves numerous lessons and constant learning,” said Taylor. “While this might seem like a technical challenge, it’s an exciting frontier that combines known technologies with innovative solutions to navigate lunar conditions and build a dynamic and robust energy network on the Moon.”
Watch the video below to explore the capabilities and scientific work enabled by the thermal testing conducted in Johnson’s Chamber A facility.
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By European Space Agency
Over the nearly 70 years of spaceflight, about 10 000 intact satellites and rocket bodies have reentered the atmosphere with many more to follow. Yet for such a ubiquitous event, we still lack a clear view on what actually happens to a satellite during its fiery last moments.
ESA is preparing the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (Draco) mission that will collect unique measurements during an actual reentry and breakup of a satellite from the inside. A capsule especially designed to survive the destruction will transmit the valuable telemetry shortly after.
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By NASA
5 min read
Voyager 1 Team Accomplishes Tricky Thruster Swap
A model of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. The twin Voyagers have been flying since 1977 and are exploring the outer regions of our solar system. NASA/JPL-Caltech The spacecraft uses its thrusters to stay pointed at Earth, but after 47 years in space some of the fuel tubes have become clogged.
Engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the spacecraft’s thrusters, which keep the distant explorer pointed at Earth so that it can receive commands, send engineering data, and provide the unique science data it is gathering.
After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank. The clogging reduces how efficiently the thrusters can generate force. After weeks of careful planning, the team switched the spacecraft to a different set of thrusters.
The thrusters are fueled by liquid hydrazine, which is turned into gases and released in tens-of-milliseconds-long puffs to gently tilt the spacecraft’s antenna toward Earth. If the clogged thruster were healthy it would need to conduct about 40 of these short pulses per day.
Both Voyager probes feature three sets, or branches, of thrusters: two sets of attitude propulsion thrusters and one set of trajectory correction maneuver thrusters. During the mission’s planetary flybys, both types of thrusters were used for different purposes. But as Voyager 1 travels on an unchanging path out of the solar system, its thruster needs are simpler, and either thruster branch can be used to point the spacecraft at Earth.
In 2002 the mission’s engineering team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, noticed some fuel tubes in the attitude propulsion thruster branch being used for pointing were clogging, so the team switched to the second branch. When that branch showed signs of clogging in 2018, the team switched to the trajectory correction maneuver thrusters and have been using that branch since then.
Now those trajectory correction thruster tubes are even more clogged than the original branches were when the team swapped them in 2018. The clogged tubes are located inside the thrusters and direct fuel to the catalyst beds, where it is turned into gases. (These are different than the fuel tubes that send hydrazine to the thrusters.) Where the tube opening was originally only 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) in diameter, the clogging has reduced it to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), or about half the width of a human hair. As a result, the team needed to switch back to one of the attitude propulsion thruster branches.
Warming Up the Thrusters
Switching to different thrusters would have been a relatively simple operation for the mission in 1980 or even 2002. But the spacecraft’s age has introduced new challenges, primarily related to power supply and temperature. The mission has turned off all non-essential onboard systems, including some heaters, on both spacecraft to conserve their gradually shrinking electrical power supply, which is generated by decaying plutonium.
While those steps have worked to reduce power, they have also led to the spacecraft growing colder, an effect compounded by the loss of other non-essential systems that produced heat. Consequently, the attitude propulsion thruster branches have grown cold, and turning them on in that state could damage them, making the thrusters unusable.
The team determined that the best option would be to warm the thrusters before the switch by turning on what had been deemed non-essential heaters. However, as with so many challenges the Voyager team has faced, this presented a puzzle: The spacecraft’s power supply is so low that turning on non-essential heaters would require the mission to turn off something else to provide the heaters adequate electricity, and everything that’s currently operating is considered essential.
Studying the issue, they ruled out turning off one of the still-operating science instruments for a limited time because there’s a risk that the instrument would not come back online. After additional study and planning, the engineering team determined they could safely turn off one of the spacecraft’s main heaters for up to an hour, freeing up enough power to turn on the thruster heaters.
It worked. On Aug. 27, they confirmed that the needed thruster branch was back in action, helping point Voyager 1 toward Earth.
“All the decisions we will have to make going forward are going to require a lot more analysis and caution than they once did,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which manages Voyager for NASA.
The spacecraft are exploring interstellar space, the region outside the bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun, where no other spacecraft are likely to visit for a long time. The mission science team is working to keep the Voyagers going for as long as possible, so they can continue to reveal what the interstellar environment is like.
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2024 Related Terms
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