NASA Solar Sail Asteroid Mission Readies for Launch on Artemis I & More Trending News

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Engineers put together NEA Scout for integration and delivery at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
NASA’s NEA Scout spacecraft in Gravity Off-load Fixture, System Test configuration at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Illustration of NASA’s NEA Scout with the photo voltaic sail deployed because it flies by its asteroid vacation spot.
Sailing on daylight, NEA Scout will seize pictures of an asteroid for scientific research.
NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Scout is tucked away safely contained in the company’s highly effective Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The photo voltaic crusing CubeSat is considered one of a number of secondary payloads hitching a journey on Artemis I, the primary built-in flight of the company’s SLS and the Orion spacecraft.
NEA Scout, a small spacecraft roughly the scale of a giant shoebox, has been packaged right into a dispenser and hooked up to the adapter ring that connects the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. The Artemis I mission will probably be an uncrewed flight check. It additionally affords deep house transportation for a number of CubeSats, enabling alternatives for small spacecraft like NEA Scout to succeed in the Moon and past as a part of the Artemis program.
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“NEA Scout will be America’s first interplanetary mission using solar sail propulsion,” stated Les Johnson, principal expertise investigator for the mission at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “There have been several sail tests in Earth orbit, and we are now ready to show we can use this new type of spacecraft propulsion to go new places and perform important science.”
The CubeSat will use chrome steel alloy booms to deploy an aluminum-coated plastic movie sail – thinner than a human hair and concerning the dimension of a racquetball court docket. The large-area sail will generate thrust by reflecting daylight. Energetic particles of daylight, known as photons, bounce off the photo voltaic sail to present it a mild but fixed push. Over time, this fixed thrust can speed up the spacecraft to very excessive speeds, permitting it to navigate by house and catch as much as its goal asteroid.
“This type of propulsion is especially useful for small, lightweight spacecraft that cannot carry large amounts of conventional rocket propellant,” Johnson stated.
NEA Scout can be a stepping-stone to a different just lately chosen NASA photo voltaic sail mission, Solar Cruiser, which is able to use a sail 16 occasions bigger when it flies in 2025.
Sailing on daylight, NEA Scout will start an approximate two-year journey to fly by a near-Earth asteroid. Once it reaches its vacation spot, the spacecraft will use a science-grade digital camera to seize pictures of the asteroid – all the way down to lower than 4 inches (10 centimeters) per pixel – which scientists will then research to additional our understanding of those small however necessary photo voltaic system neighbors. High-resolution imaging is made doable because of the low-velocity flyby (lower than 100 toes, or 30 meters, per second) enabled by the photo voltaic sail.
The knowledge obtained will assist scientists perceive a smaller class of asteroids – these measuring lower than 100 meters (330 toes) throughout – which have by no means been explored by spacecraft.
“The images gathered by NEA Scout will provide critical information on the asteroid’s physical properties such as orbit, shape, volume, rotation, the dust and debris field surrounding it, plus its surface properties,” stated Julie Castillo-Rogez, the mission’s principal science investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Near-Earth asteroids are additionally necessary locations for exploration, in situ useful resource utilization, and scientific analysis. In the previous decade, detections of near-Earth asteroids have steadily risen and are anticipated to develop, providing expanded alternatives as exploration locations.
“Despite their size, some of these small asteroids could pose a threat to Earth,” Dr. Jim Stott, NEA Scout expertise challenge supervisor, stated. “Understanding their properties could help us develop strategies for reducing the potential damage caused in the event of an impact.”
Scientists will use this knowledge to find out what’s required to scale back threat, improve effectiveness, and enhance the design and operations of robotic and human house exploration, added Castillo-Rogez.
NEA Scout is developed beneath NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems division. The CubeSat is designed and developed by NASA Marshall in Huntsville, Alabama, and JPL in Southern California.
Molly Porter
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-424-5158
molly.a.porter@nasa.gov
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
2021-145
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JPL is a federally funded analysis and improvement heart managed for NASA by Caltech.

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