Small Spacecraft Activities Around the Agency
Highlights for February 2022
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Wallops Flight Facility
Petitsat, the first of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s five 6-unit (U) SmallSats currently in progress, is preparing to deliver to Nanoracks, LLC in February for a May 2022 launch. Over the holidays the Petitsat team completed vibration and thermal vacuum testing. Recently, the team has worked through pre-shipment verifications and testing, as well as making the final updates to flight software and preparations for operations. For more information on this upcoming Heliophysics mission, please click on the petitSat tab at: https://smallsat.wff.nasa.gov/2021/smallsatgsfc/
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center / CubeSat Launch Initiative
Since November 2021, NASA’s Launch Services Program has facilitated the launch of six additional CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) selected CubeSats on two different Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) missions: four CubeSats on the ELaNa 38 mission aboard SpaceX’s 24th Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) mission, and two CubeSats on the ELaNa 29 mission on Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne. To date, 136 CSLI CubeSats have launched and another 45 are slated to fly on 10 different ELaNa missions within the next 12 months. The 13th annual CSLI proposal selection process is currently underway with selections expected in early 2022.
Additionally, the four CubeSat payloads on ELaNa 38 were successfully deployed on January 24, 2022 from the International Space Station and all are operating in an optimal manner. The two Pathfinder for Autonomous Navigation (PAN) CubeSats on ELaNa 29 also successfully reached orbit on January 19, 2022, marking another success for the initiative.
Read more about CSLI at the following links:
NASA’s Johnson Space Center
In late 2021, NASA’s Johnson Space Center completed assembly, integration, test, and delivery of the R5-S1 spacecraft. The R5 series of spacecraft is intended to provide targeted advancement of technologies relevant to in-space inspection, rapidly and affordably. R5-S1 is the first in a series of four missions intended to determine exactly how lean current processes can be made while 1) still resulting in mission success, and 2) demonstrating new technologies such as cameras, computer, communication method, and algorithms that support in-space inspection. R5-S1 launched on February 10 as part of the ELaNa 41 mission which experienced a launch failure. Plans for the R5 series of missions continue with the next spacecraft, R5-S4, about to start fabrication.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
A number of small spacecraft projects recently completed milestones.
The Lunar Flashlight project completed system integration and testing; thermal vacuum testing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and its pre-ship review. The spacecraft was shipped to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama for fueling of the ‘green’ monopropellant (AF-M315E). Following fueling, the spacecraft will be sent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for processing. Lunar Flashlight is expected to launch this spring. For more information please visit: https://www.gtri.gatech.edu/newsroom/lunar-flashlight
The Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) project was recently selected under NASA’s Earth Venture program for a new Phase A to start in April of this year. The mission is comprised of three Blue Canyon Technologies’ X-SAT Venus-Class buses, each with Ka-band radar and one with a cross-track scanning microwave radiometer. The planned launch timeframe is October 2026.
The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE), Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PreFire) and Lunar Trailblazer projects continue to make good progress in their flight hardware development.
