Team Miles

As a participant in the Centennial Challenge’s CubeQuest Competition, our mission goals are to demonstrate the ability to conduct autonomous orbital maneuvers, navigate to a target given limited information, along with demonstrating robust communications with ground stations from deep space from at least 3M km. Deploying from the Space Launch System’s inaugural flight, Artemis 1, the craft will autonomously travel into deep space. To communicate, the thrusters will be used to turn the craft 90 degrees in order to point the antennas towards Earth during communication windows. We expect to be orbiting between 3M km and 10M km during the mission, which ends 1 year after deployment.

Read more about Team Miles here!

Team members:

Propulsion:

Team Miles developed the propulsion system, ConstantQ™, during the CubeQuest Challenge. The technology converts electricity and water vapor into thrust. This mission uses a brine solution, which proved to be a safe, energy efficient, and inexpensive propellant. More information can be found at miles-space.com.

The ConstantQ™ family of thrusters use a pulsed electrostatic cycle to enable a variety of Earth-orbiting and deep space missions using water propellant. Test results show water’s vapor pressure and its plasma speciation are especially useful to this operating cycle.

A ConstantQ™ thruster has:

• a plasma formation region containing spark electrodes
• two exhaust ports, each ringed by acceleration electrodes
• a single power supply providing spark and acceleration power

Vapor enters the plasma formation region, expanding and changing pressure on its path towards the exhaust ports. Each exhaust port is ringed with high voltage electrodes. One port’s voltages act to focus and extract positive ions from the plasma, while the other affects electrons.

Computer:

The main computer was developed by former Team Miles members. Yosemite Space’s CubeStar provides a high-powered redundant computing module. The included health monitoring software provides supervision of the computer’s status, and an automatic activation of the back-up CPU if needed.

Communications:

The COTS USRP B200 mini 784415-01-01 S-Band transceiver from Ettus is being used for the mission. It works in conjunction with an LNA and tuned S-Band Patch Antennas each for receiving data from a ground station and to transmit data between the CubeSat and NASA based DSN/NSN facilities.

Installation at KSC:

Team Alpha CubeSat

Left: CAD model of the ISARA spacecraft showing the payload components. The red lines illustrate the reflectarray beam focusing concept. © 2018 Aerospace Corporation, NASA JPL, and/or Pumpkin Space Systems. Right: LRALL. (a) Array with eight metal-coated CCRs. (b) Array with eight TIR CCRs. (c) Illustration showing LRALL geometry and optical reference point. CCR illustration is not to scale. CG, center of gravity.

Credits: Aerospace Corporation, NASA JPL, and/or Pumpkin Space Systems

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