Lockheed Martin is looking to give diminutive CubeSats a pretty big job –
regularly updating existing satellite constellations in orbit. Lockheed
Martin’s IN-space Upgrade Satellite System (LINUSS) is a new CubeSat family
designed to demonstrate technologies to perform such tasks and it has
finished environmental testing and will be used on future missions to test
new small satellite capabilities.
Modern Earth satellites have progressed far beyond the time when they were
generally one-offs designed to work alone. Today, satellites commonly work
in increasingly larger and more interactive constellations. This greatly
improves their capabilities, but it also makes maintaining them an expensive
proposition.
Filling in coverage gaps or upgrading a constellation can involve launching
large satellites and rendering perfectly good spacecraft obsolete or
enduring increasingly poor service until technology has advanced far enough
to warrant a major overhaul, both approaches of which are more than a little
bit wasteful. A more efficient proposition is to use CubeSats to handle the
upgrades, as well as providing platforms to test new technologies quickly
and cheaply.
LINUSS consists of a pair of LM 15 CubeSats, each of which is about the size
of a double toaster, that were developed with Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems,
with Lockheed providing the electro-optical payload decks. Solar panels
produce up to 250 W of power for the craft which will have an endurance of
up to five years.
These will be placed in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) at an altitude of
about 22,236 miles (35,786 km), where they will carry out their primary
mission of demonstrating the CubeSat's maneuvering capabilities for future
upgrade and servicing missions. In addition, they will test a miniaturized
system for space domain awareness, or the ability to detect, track, and
identify inactive satellites, spent boosters, and other debris.
These demonstrations will include onboard high-performance data processing,
a low-toxicity propulsion system from VACCO, and inertial measurement units,
machine vision, 3-D printed components, and SmartSat software from Lockheed.
The eventual goal is to certify the technology to support Lockheed's LM 2100
satellite bus platforms, beginning with GPS IIIF Space Vehicle 13.
“Given we are well known for our systems integration work on large satellite
systems, some people are surprised to learn Lockheed Martin has launched
over 150 small satellites since 1997,” says Dr. David J. Barnhart, LINUSS
Program Director. “LINUSS has higher bus density, payload accommodation, and
on-orbit processing than any other CubeSat, enabling revolutionary mission
capabilities in the future. Early customer community feedback has called
LINUSS 'the most capable CubeSat pair off the planet.'”