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Few missions more acutely embody the maxim “ space is hard ” than Atomos Space ’s first demonstration mission , which the company has managed to pull back from the brink of disaster — more than once .
That presentment missionary post , dubbed Mission-1 , launched to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4.The objectives of the mission are challenging to the extremum : The two ballistic capsule — an orbital transfer fomite called Quark - LITE and a target vehicle called Gluon — will eventually demonstrate exceedingly complex maneuver , including rendezvous , docking , orbital transfer and on - cranial orbit refueling .
The company has faced two main consequence related to communications and the spacecraft rotation rate — and it ’s ( largely ) solved both problems , despite enormous constraints , infrequent data point packets and extremely special bandwidth . ( So limited , in fact , that the team has had to crest its flight of stairs software update to a string of textbook that is just 145 characters long . )
“ It ’s been unappeasable , ” Atomos CEO and co - founder Vanessa Clark told TechCrunch .
The company ’s COO and carbon monoxide - founder , William Kowalski , agreed . “ What make it so hard , even in our situation , we ’re test to extrapolate the condition of a very complicated system from maybe 100 byte of information , ” he say . “ It ’s a lot of … making guesses as to what is driving this , knowing that some of those guess could take you down a path where you never recover . ”
The issues start just hours after the two ballistic capsule , which are mated together , deploy from the Falcon 9 upper stage . Deployment was nominal , and Atomos received its first Ping River from the spacecraft seven arcminute after deployment . The temper was celebratory .
But then 40 minutes went by until the company got its next Ping River . Then eight hours .
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Atomos was have a bun in the oven data parcel every couple of minutes .
“ The worst [ day ] was the Monday when we set up , that evening , ” Kowalski said . “ It was 11 o’clock at night , it was me and the principal technologist … and we have n’t heard anything , and we ’re just thinking , did we give way ? Did they perish ? We gave it a shot , and it just did n’t work . That was really a bowel clout . ”
commission controllers only identified the antecedent cause 24 to 48 hour after deployment , and they did so with the aid of another company with assets on area . After pull some strings , they were able to get on the phone with the foreman systems engineer of satellite communications company Iridium . The ballistic capsule were using third - political party modems that leveraged Iridium ’s inter - satellite link meshwork , in addition to using Iridium ’s constellation as their relay satellites . Atomos ’ spacecraft were moving too fast , and in direct opposition , such that they could n’t perform the information “ handshake ” with those Iridium satellites to actually transmit data back down to Earth .
Atomos engineers ended up pushing a series of software update that shrink the duty cycling and ensured the radios would always be on , even if the spacecraft was in a low - power state .
As engineers were trying to fix the communications job , however , they present a dissimilar issue : The space vehicle were tumbling at an extremely speedy rate of 55 degrees per second ( they were design to deal with a bun pace up to 5 grade per second ) . In addition , the space vehicle were slowly rotating so that the solar array were no longer front the sunshine . That meant it was a race against meter — and against the space vehicle batteries give way wholly .
“ We had two graphs , ” Kowalski say . “ We graphed out our magnate trend on when we think we ’d be pointed away from sun and be [ at ] zero mogul , and our detumble rate . It was get the detumble charge per unit to zero before the power goes to zero . ”
The issuing was aggravate by the limited comms ; the teams were n’t able-bodied to definitively corroborate something was haywire until the 4th day after deployment , and the spacecraft could only bear new commands in - between long periods of what were essentially communications blackouts .
lento , over a full stop of Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , they were able to slow down the spacecraft . The team got another major profits when it managed to shew high - bandwidth comms , a space - to - space radio link on the Quark - LITE that talks over the Inmarsat web . The company made the first attack to get on the high - bandwidth comms Thursday , and they successfully hold comms with the spacecraft for six min .
During that period , mission restrainer receive 17 times more data than they had since launching . This has provided delegacy controller with immense measure of data point on the spacecraft wellness . Not all the news was positive — one of the electric battery pack on the OTV was strike hard by the aggressive cycling , and it seems like the GPS needs to be readjust onboard one of the spacecraft — but these are well-heeled fixes , Clark said .
By Tuesday or Wednesday , the company is aim to start commission the actuation system . If all goes to plan , and engineers can establish that the property system is providing pointing truth and control , they will test operations with torque rods and reaction wheels off . The company aims to separate the spacecraft in around a month ’s time , with the aim of discharge all the mission objectives by the end of June .
Kowalski and Clark credit some of the inauguration ’s success to the fact that it ’s highly vertically integrate . The team — which pulled a 100 - hour week in that first calendar week after deployment — was able to make for its intimate knowledge of the spacecraft design to trouble - solve the issues that came up .
“ It ’s obviously been very painful , but it ’s like the CEO of Nvidia says : ‘ I wish upon you capital suffering . ’ We have gone through that and it was n’t swell in the instant , but now that we ’re through the midst of it , we ’re definitely more complete , ” Clark enunciate .
