Other Mission Enabling Services

Initial Acquisition Support

We have helped customers develop strategies for determining the appropriate ground stations to contact to ensure their spacecraft can be located after launch. This support includes discussing mission and spacecraft needs with the DSN or commercial ground station providers to ensure the spacecraft can receive commands and transmit mission data and telemetry when needed.

Deep-Space Mission Design

This skill set helps mission designers identify when to plan maneuvers, at what magnitude, and with how much delta-V. We used this complex analysis specifically for ESCAPADE.

Orbit Insertion at Mars

By supporting multiple cislunar, xGEO, and Mars missions, we have learned how to address a variety of problems associated with Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI). ESCAPADE originally had a low-thrust trajectory that rendezvoused with Mars and then spiraled downward toward its final orbit. Through a series of design iterations, our astrodynamics team provided ESCAPADE with a very simple, robust 11-minute MOI burn that is inertially fixed. Additionally, ESCAPADE comprises two spacecraft with MOIs that are separated by 47 hours. The mission design Advanced Space provided has MOI corridors larger than necessary to expand the number of potentially useful orbits.

Advanced Space used a different approach for EMM, which used a single spacecraft. The mission required a single-axis, constant-rate rotation for the burn. The spacecraft had to perform a longer burn to rotate, make the burn efficient, and save fuel. We built missions that used gravity assists to line up an orbit insertion and built tools that reduced the risk of these critical maneuvers by meeting navigation requirements in nominal and lost-thruster cases.

Event List Creation

For science missions, Advanced Space generated a list of instrument activities and orbital events using science investigation rules and logic. External partner teams took this list and performed power, data, and attitude analyses for spacecraft pointing requirements. The events list was executed in an application we created called the Science Coverage Analysis Report (SCAR) to do the science analysis using science evaluation rules determined by us and the science teams. The SCAR is an automated report that is generated based on our ConOps to evaluate how well we accomplish our science requirements. From this, we were able to create a hard-copy graphic that depicts the events list along a timeline that also shows where in the orbit the event takes place. We also developed a web application view to show the same visual.

Planetary Protection

Advanced Space has significant experience in helping customers establish trajectory bias for LVs and spacecraft to define the B-plane corridor in support of planetary protection. This behavior is necessary when aiming a spacecraft toward Mars to prevent microbial contamination. Consequently, the aimpoints for injection and early Trajectory Correction Maneuvers (TCMs) are biased away from the planet to reduce the probability of unintended Mars impact, thus satisfying these requirements.

Orbit Strategies

Multiple approaches can be used to establish a science orbit around Earth or another celestial destination, depending on the spacecraft. Previously we have modeled, designed, and implemented the following maneuvers:

  • Conventional chemical propulsion burns, which are straightforward and low-risk
  • Low-thrust spirals for electric propulsion
  • Ballistic lunar transfers (BLTs) to reduce delta-V and increase mass delivered to cislunar orbits
  • Science constellations placed at Sun-Venus Lagrange points to study the solar wind
  • Science constellations flown equidistantly in time to maximize study of the Earth’s magnetosphere
  • Aerobraking, which entails higher risk but saves a lot of fuel
  • Phobos and Deimos avoidance to prevent a spacecraft from colliding with one of the Mars moons
  • Multi-moon tour of Saturnian system for slow approach to orbiting the moon Enceladus