Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 1 November 2010, was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It describes nanosatellite technologies and proposes launching nanosats into orbit with laser Lightcraft propulsion. It also covers a weapon mission selection study and multi-megawatt laser options. The author recommends that the Department of Defense and NASA bring Lightcraft R&D back to the United States and restart the X-50LR flight demonstration program.
“Masse”33 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//F&II. &FFll!IAI! l!l!il! 9Hl:Y plastic; fiber reinforced plastic; flat stock composite construction; and carbon nanotubes (a.k.a. "Buckytubes") or carbon nanotubes composited with other materials. The material will be selected based on mass, cost, manufacturability, ease of assembly and integration, and suitability for the space environment. Streamlined testing is needed for up to 100 or 1000 nanosats per mission. Performing a complete test program on each unit would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming. We need to reduce the quantity of testing required while assuring product quality to meet program cost and schedule goals. Lot testing and statistical quality control methods should be developed to verify quality and structural performance by testing a small subset of the total number of nanosats. INSTRUMENTS Instruments for in-situ and remote measurements must be miniaturized to fit within the mass and volume constraints of a nanosat. Power consumption must also be scaled down accordingly. Instrument sensitivities cannot be compromised in the process. Instrument electronics need to be combined with nanosat subsystem electronics to achieve higher degrees of integration yielding reduced mass and volume. Instrument software will be designed to evaluate the onboard data and adjust instrument data rates and modes to efficiently capture the data of highest priority. GROUND SYSTEMS The large number of nanosats in a constellation is a challenge to the ground system in getting all of the data to the users. In a typical baseline mission, there are times when up to ten (or more) nanosats would be within communications range of a ground station at a single time. A minimal model for the ground station contacts shows that they can support a nanosat constellation with only two ground stations located on opposite sides of the Earth. The schedulers will prioritize the contacts, with the nanosats in the higher period orbits getting priority. Nanosats in the lower period orbits have more opportunities to dump their data, and therefore can have lower priority without risking any data loss. Since the nanosats are autonomous, the operations concept for a mission requires only a few operators to determine the nanosat orbits, schedule the ground stations, and to investigate anomalies on the spacecraft. Automated systems will monitor the housekeeping data from the spacecraft and they will flag problems for the spacecraft engineers to investigate. The large number of nanosats allows the risk management to be different for this mission than for single spacecraft missions. Except for commands to initiate the data downlink, the ground system will not command the nanosats for normal operations. The only commands that the ground system sends would be program loads to resolve or work around problems and failures. The large number of nanosats in a constellation is a configuration control challenge for the data tracking, the schedules, the command loads, the science or intelligence data, and the engineering data. The ground system will use IDs, colorcoded user interfaces, and other techniques to ensure that the operators and users can keep track of the data UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR QFFlil.ltk 11181!!! 8HLY 9
Not linked to a story yet.
Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 77 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.