Small Spacecraft Community of Practice
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Radar in a CubeSat (RainCube) Mission Overview
Speaker: Shannon Statham, Ph.D., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
10:00AM-11:00AM Pacific Standard Time
Click here to watch the webinar.
Click here to download the presentation.
Abstract: RainCube (Radar in a CubeSat) is a NASA InVEST mission that successfully demonstrated the first radar payload on a CubeSat in space. RainCube featured two new Ka-band technologies, a miniaturized atmospheric radar and an ultra-compact deployable mesh antenna, that were specifically designed to fit within a CubeSat volume and to demonstrate the feasibility of flying a science-grade radar instrument on a CubeSat or similar small satellite platform. RainCube was deployed from the ISS into low Earth orbit in July 2018 and successfully completed its baseline mission in October 2018. RainCube continued to operate and collect precipitation measurements, including coincident measurements of hurricanes and tropical storms with TEMPEST-D, until it naturally de-orbited in December 2020. The success of RainCube has paved the way for future atmospheric radars on small satellites, including the recently selected Earth Venture Mission, INCUS.
Bio: Dr. Shannon Statham is the Supervisor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Environmental Dynamics Test Group and the System Integration and Test Lead for Lunar Flashlight. Dr. Statham joined JPL in 2011, and she specializes in integration and test for flight programs and implementation of CubeSat and small satellite missions. Past roles include Project Manager for RainCube, AMR-C Instrument Integration and Test Lead for Sentinel-6, System Integration and Test Lead for MarCO, and Project Manager for RACE. Dr. Statham has also served on multiple advisory boards, review boards, and tiger teams for CubeSat and Type II missions at JPL, and she is currently the Technical Affairs Subcommittee Chair for the AIAA Small Satellite Technical Committee. Dr. Statham received her BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Central Florida and her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
S3VI encourages the community to submit questions before the webinar to enable more directed responses. Please send questions to raquel.l.redhouse@nasa.gov.
