Year: 2011
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Department of Defense Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office are exercising a multi-year collaborative agreement focused on a redefinition of the way space missions are designed and implemented. A much faster, leaner and effective approach to space flight requires the concerted effort of a multi-agency and industry team tasked with developing the building blocks, both programmatically and technologically, to ultimately achieve flights within 7-days from mission call-up. For NASA, rapid mission implementations represent an opportunity to find creative ways for reducing mission life-cycle times with the resulting savings in cost. This in turn enables a class of missions catering to a broader audience of science participants, from universities to private and national laboratory researchers. To that end, the SMART microspacecraft prototype demonstrates an advanced avionics system with integrated GPS capability, high-speed plugand- play-able interfaces, legacy interfaces, inertial navigation, a modular reconfigurable structure, tunable thermal technology, and a number of instruments for environmental and optical sensing. Although SMART first launches inside a sounding rocket, it is designed as a free-flyer.
Institutions: Goddard Space Flight Center, U.S. Air Force Space Command
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2128170708