Session
Weekday Session 2: Beyond LEO
Location
Utah State University, Logan, UT
Abstract
The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft launched November 24, 2021 carrying LICIACube, a 6U CubeSat. As a low-cost mission utilizing a ship-and-shoot launch campaign during a global pandemic, the DART and LICIACube teams encountered many unique engineering challenges during integration and test (I&T). This paper explores both the successes and lessons learned in reducing the engineering risk from the procurement of an additional flight dispenser to providing and sharing of EM hardware for providing remote support of various tests.
The DART mission is led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) in Laurel, Maryland. DART is an on-orbit demonstration of asteroid deflection using the kinetic impactor technique on a binary near-Earth asteroid system called Didymos. The system is composed of two asteroids: the larger asteroid Didymos (diameter: 780 meters, 0.48 miles), and the smaller moonlet asteroid, Dimorphos (diameter: 160 meters, 525 feet), which orbits the larger asteroid. The DART spacecraft, built at JHU/APL, is set to impact Dimorphos nearly head-on (in the fall of 2022), shortening the time it takes the small asteroid moonlet to orbit Didymos by several minutes.
The Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), DART’s companion CubeSat, was contributed to the DART mission by the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) and built by Argotec in Turin, Italy. LICIACube will be deployed from the DART spacecraft roughly ten days prior to DART's impact to capture images of the event and its effects. The CubeSat will provide imagery documentation of the impact, as well as in situ observation of the impact site and resultant ejecta plume. The design of the LICIACube spacecraft is based on a 6U platform and carries two instruments: LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid), a narrow field panchromatic camera to acquire images from long distance with a high spatial resolution and LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer), a wide field RGB camera, allowing a multicolor analysis of the asteroidal environment.
LICIACube: CubeSat Unique Engineering Challenges on the DART Mission
Utah State University, Logan, UT
The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft launched November 24, 2021 carrying LICIACube, a 6U CubeSat. As a low-cost mission utilizing a ship-and-shoot launch campaign during a global pandemic, the DART and LICIACube teams encountered many unique engineering challenges during integration and test (I&T). This paper explores both the successes and lessons learned in reducing the engineering risk from the procurement of an additional flight dispenser to providing and sharing of EM hardware for providing remote support of various tests.
The DART mission is led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) in Laurel, Maryland. DART is an on-orbit demonstration of asteroid deflection using the kinetic impactor technique on a binary near-Earth asteroid system called Didymos. The system is composed of two asteroids: the larger asteroid Didymos (diameter: 780 meters, 0.48 miles), and the smaller moonlet asteroid, Dimorphos (diameter: 160 meters, 525 feet), which orbits the larger asteroid. The DART spacecraft, built at JHU/APL, is set to impact Dimorphos nearly head-on (in the fall of 2022), shortening the time it takes the small asteroid moonlet to orbit Didymos by several minutes.
The Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), DART’s companion CubeSat, was contributed to the DART mission by the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) and built by Argotec in Turin, Italy. LICIACube will be deployed from the DART spacecraft roughly ten days prior to DART's impact to capture images of the event and its effects. The CubeSat will provide imagery documentation of the impact, as well as in situ observation of the impact site and resultant ejecta plume. The design of the LICIACube spacecraft is based on a 6U platform and carries two instruments: LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid), a narrow field panchromatic camera to acquire images from long distance with a high spatial resolution and LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer), a wide field RGB camera, allowing a multicolor analysis of the asteroidal environment.
