A pair of spacecraft is undergoing final testing before traveling about 230 million miles to explore the Red Planet.
This week, Rocket Lab announced that the two spacecraft it is building for NASA’s EscaPADE mission have entered the systems integration phase in preparation for launch in 2024, the company wrote. The dual spacecraft mission will head to Mars to study the planet’s magnetosphere as part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program.
The spacecraft has passed its initial Systems Integration Review (SIR) and engineers are now beginning the process of integrating the flight hardware, where the solar array, reaction wheel, star tracker, separation system, radio, and flight software are all integrated with the spacecraft. . Other flight instruments were also sent from the University of California, Berkeley and other mission partners to Rocket Lab headquarters in Long Beach, where the integration process took place.
“Reaching the flight integration phase for a new spacecraft is an important milestone, especially for a complex interplanetary mission like this,” said Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, in a company statement.
The integration process will continue with a testing campaign, including vibration, thermal vacuum and electromagnetic compatibility testing. Rocket Lab also conducted compatibility tests between the spacecraft and NASA’s Deep Space Network, a series of giant radio antennas that the space agency uses to communicate with its interplanetary missions.
EscaPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, is designed to investigate the processes that control the structure of Mars’ hybrid magnetosphere and how it guides ion flows, as well as how energy and momentum are transported from the solar wind through the Martian magnetosphere, according to NASA. The mission will also explore the processes controlling the flow of energy and matter into and out of the impact atmosphere. Importantly, “the mission will explore how the solar wind removes Mars’ atmosphere to better understand how its climate changed over time,” according to Rocket Lab. Once on Mars, the mission is expected to last about six months.
The mission was originally supposed to launch at the same time as the Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid, which lifted off on October 13, but there were problems with the required trajectory. Instead, EscaPADE will now launch in 2024 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which has seen multiple delays.
2023-10-23 02:03:25
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