Astranis, an organization looking for to supply Web connectivity from geostationary space, said in May that its “Arcturus” satellite was successfully deployed following a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
After taking control of the satellite, Astranis then began to send commands and update the flight software before raising Arcturus’ orbit and slotting it right into a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite linked up with an Web gateway in Utah and communicated with multiple user terminals in Alaska.
Sometime after this, nonetheless, the satellite experienced what Astranis characterised as an abrupt anomaly with a supplier’s component on the solar array drive assembly. In an update on Friday, Astranis co-founder John Gedmark explained that this assembly rotates to solar arrays to make sure they’re all the time pointed on the Sun, allowing the spacecraft to stay fully powered in any respect times.
“The Astranis engineering team has been doing an incredible job working across the clock to troubleshoot the difficulty,” Gedmark said. “We’ve now reproduced the issue on the bottom in a vacuum chamber, zeroed in on the precise source of the failure, and know the best way to fix it for future spacecraft. Because this failure occurred inside the internal workings of a component supplied by an external vendor, we’re not able to enter the total technical details.”
The frustration in Gedmark’s update is palpable.
“This can be a frustrating situation—the Arcturus spacecraft is in a protected state and fully under our control, the payload and our other Astranis in-house designed components are all working perfectly, and the tanks are fueled for years of on-orbit operation,” he said. “But unless something major changes, the mission of providing Web connectivity in Alaska might be delayed.”
Fixed for the long run
Astranis was founded in 2015 to find out whether microsatellites built largely in-house could deliver high-speed Web from geostationary space at a low price. The launch of Arcturus marked the primary demonstration that Astranis’ small satellite technology worked in space and will survive the tough radiation and thermal environment previously dominated by much larger satellites that cost a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Provided that this was an effort to check this technology on a shoestring budget, it is maybe not surprising that the satellite ultimately failed attributable to some unexpected problem. The actual acid test for Astranis, now, is to be certain that it learns from this failure and that the corporate’s second satellite works in space.
In his update, Gedmark said the corporate understands the best way to quickly solve this issue on future spacecraft which might be in production. The corporate can be working toward an answer to supply Web service in Alaska, via Pacific Dataport, as initially planned with Arcturus.
The backup plan, he said, “involves a special, multipurpose satellite that may operate as an on-orbit spare and bridge us to a full alternative satellite. We call this satellite UtilitySat. It may well operate anywhere on this planet, on multiple frequency bands, with the pliability of a software-defined satellite. UtilitySat has been within the works for over a 12 months, is in the ultimate stages of integration, and is manifested on our very next launch that can happen at the top of this 12 months.”