Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

This illustration of NASA’s Solar Cruiser shows the small satellite with its solar sail deployed. The Space Dynamics Laboratory will build two space-based radios for the spacecraft.
Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

A NASA technology demonstration mission integrates several new technologies aboard a small satellite to validate solar sail propulsion.

Solar Cruiser is sponsored by the NASA Heliophysics Division’s Solar Terrestrial Probes Program. Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in North Logan Utah announced today that it has been awarded a contract to build two space-based radios for the mission.

The contract was awarded by Solar Cruiser prime contractor Ball Aerospace, which is providing the small satellite.

Space weather watch

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is developing the Solar Cruiser mission, set to fly in 2025, to mature solar sail propulsion technology for future missions.

Solar Cruiser will deploy the ultra-thin reflective sail – the largest sail ever flown — with an area of 1,650 square meters (17,800 square feet). That’s large enough to cover more than six tennis courts.

Solar Cruiser will also demonstrate technologies that will enable subsequent missions to improve space-weather monitoring, prediction, and science.

Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center

Information provided by Solar Cruiser will allow scientists, engineers, and mission planners to discern better how solar sail propulsion can be used by spacecraft to collect observations from novel vantage points that are difficult to reach and sustain.

The SDL-built Iris radios onboard Solar Cruiser will fly approximately one million miles sunward of the Earth at Lagrange Point L1, the position in space where Earth’s and the Sun’s gravity are balanced along the Sun-Earth-line, and relay mission data to NASA’s Deep Space Network and other ground networks.

Smallsat growth

In an SDL statement, Asal Naseri, SDL’s satellite technologies branch head for civil and commercial space, said: “As more small satellites operate in deep space, there is a correlating need for radios that can function in the unique conditions of deep space.”

Naseri also added that the space industry has experienced a rapid ascent of spacecraft with masses of less than 500 kilograms—classified as small satellites—and related technologies used for technology demonstration, science, commercial and other applications. “Last year, more than 1,700 small satellites were launched, compared to 1,163  in 2020, and 757 in 2019.”