We are pleased to announce that today, 5th December 2018, at 09:15 CET, our CEO, Dr. Ing. Giulio MANZONI has delivered a speech at the United Nations Expert Meeting on Human Space Technology, organized at the UN in Vienna by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs with the support of China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) & Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
With a title of ASTRILIS remote asteroid acquisition mission, the most efficient sourcing of materials from space for mankind, it marks the beginning of a new era in the history of humankind: The ASTROLITHIC AGE.
With this presentation, based on the original work of the Astrilis Working Group (AWG), deeply studied and elaborated by Mr. Dwight Prouty IV and further detailed in cooperation with Microspace, we set the beginning of the program which will modify the essential celestial structure of our planet Earth and our Solar System for the benefit of Humankind and preservation of Nature on Earth.
Asteroids of kilometer scale will be collected and parked in Geostationary Orbit (GSO) to supply every year billions of tons of raw materials for further refinement and use both on Earth and in orbit, for the future relocation of industrial activities away from the surface of Earth, sustainable production of energy from the Sun and eventually relocation of a large portion of Humankind in Space.
The relatively modest cost of each asteroid relocation, being comparable to the construction of a typical shopping mall or a modern condominium, will be, per unit of provided material mass, several orders of magnitudes smaller than any present space exploration mission; it will represent an enormous financial return for Humankind and a very interesting opportunity for the enterprises that will decide to join AWG.
The effort which we officially start today will be equitably shared by the whole Humankind for the benefit and conservation of our Planet Earth and for our expansion in to Space, it will be supervised and regulated by a new Space Agency belonging to All Earth Nations to prevent the creation of colonial monopolies in Space.
The immediate benefit of this program will be a strong contribution to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and it will be a decisive step in the direction of containment and control of the global warming.
More information is immediately available at Astrilis and will be regularly published on Microspace Journal as the project progresses.
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We are very pleased to witness that our Athenoxat-1 has reached her 1000 and 1 nights in orbit and continues her journey healthily bringing us many magical images of Earth and the Universe. We always remember the days before Athenoxat launch when we hoped she could be our pride and now our hope has come true.
Athenoxat is a very special bird in her class; she can bring to us the complete view of Earth with day and night images from a global perspective, wide angle and high resolution. She is also the first in her class to readily transmit images for the Radio Amateur community to receive.
To this day we have accumulated much experience in nanosatellites and especially Athenoxat operation. Starting from manual to 24/7 automated operations, and configuring many options and settings for enabling many unexplored features that have brought us new and different experiences as compared to other nanosatellites operation. We hope that Athenoxat-1 will never cease in giving us wonders and thus let more magical journey begin.
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A microrocket does not seem complicated if you have a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to look at it, otherwise it appears even simpler as you do not see it at all with naked eye, so most of us cannot relate to it. But now imagine: that rocket has a throat 10 times narrower than a human hair thickness. Something you cannot even see will produce a precise and adjustable thrust of 1mN (nominal at full throttle), just right to maneuver an orbiting nanosatellite.
We produce it by means of photolithography, deep reactive ion etching, anodic bonding and dicing, just like the accelerometers and gyroscopes of your smartphones, airbags and drones.
We start from a thin dish of silicon, because it can be precisely etched by a plasma of very reactive elements (SF6). This means that if such dish is covered by a protective layer patterned with the profile of the nozzle, then such reactive elements will just dig that profile in the silicon.
So, we cover the dish, called “wafer”, with a uniform and thin layer of a polymer, by spinning a drop of it on the wafer while is quickly rotating for a few seconds. Then we expose it to ultraviolet light (UV) through a mask that has a transparent image of the nozzle: either multiple microscopic images spaced to cover the whole wafer or few larger images that are projected through a lens system that scales them down to their final microscopic size and then is moved to repeat the exposure on the rest of the wafer.
We develop the polymer with a chemical to remove the area that was exposed to the UV light and we immerse the wafer in quickly alternating cycles of reactive plasma and passivizing Teflon to cover the etched walls so that the etching progresses perpendicularly to the wafer and produces the beautiful high aspect ratio groove that forms the nozzle (Deep Reactive-Ion Etching).
After the etching is completed on both faces, which involves a second exposure aligned to the first one, we bond a glass wafer on the silicon by means of high temperature and voltage. At the end we cut the wafer to release hundreds of micronozzles !
Those are the micronozzles that, firstly designed by CFD and then carefully characterized one by one on our specially made microbalance, have been mounted on POPSAT and have been working in Space for 9 months of micropropulsion experiments.
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When we started Microspace, we sketched a Roadmap to define all project steps needed to reach our final goal of Nanosatellites formation flight; that sketch was adopted in the initial European Space Agency (ESA) harmonization documents as early as 2002. Our Microhtrusters are rocket engines, just very, very small. The first step to develop any rocket engine is to calculate its main dimensions for the thrust we want to achieve. This is easy, you can take the Sutton or any other similar book, no need to be "rocket scientist". But this will give you just a couple of diameters and a length, and you would be lucky to achieve half of the maximum possible efficiency. That is why we used Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate the flow in the nozzle as accurately as possible before starting any expensive manufacturing.
CFD is the art of calculating pressures, temperatures, velocities and other flow parameters on small elements of the whole flow domain by means of approximations and interpolations using numerical methods. One of the most used is the Finite Elements Method (FEM), where the flow values are evaluated on nodes of a grid and the flow behaviors are interpolated by means of polinomial shape functions along the grid or integrated in the elements resulting by the grid segments, whereby such functions are expressed by physical laws such as the Navier-Stokes equations (which are a particular case of the 2nd Law of Newton). In our case, compressibilty, viscosity and turbulence have been included in the calculation and a particular formulation of the elements at the walls has been used to consider the boundary layer. Once the domain is modeled, it is meshed with a proper subdivision in Elements of Finite dimension, all equations on all nodes and elements are combined and the resulting matrix is solved, usually by iterations since CFD is highly non linear and hence the matrix cannot be just inverted like for structural, thermal or magnetic problems.
The results are then represented by means of colors or vectors or both and the overall properties of the flow can be integrated over the domain, control volumes or cross sections to understand the performances of the design. Usually many designs need to be attempted before the best shape is identified. As we will explain in another article, many shapes have been simulated and tested to obtain the exact design rules for our special micronozzles. This is how we can achieve the maximum possible efficiency.
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As part of celebrating the 2 years of Athenoxat-1 in space, we activated the new type of her data beacon, which is image type. She is now beaconing image thumbnails that she had produced by herself. It was very satisfying to know that the Radio Amateurs community is excited about this new feature. The new beacon type has also enabled Athenoxat-1 to send QSL cards to those who have listened to her before. Scheduled transmissions have been conducted successfully confirmed by the joyful recipients. The above images are the cards that have been transmitted out by Athenoxat.
It is a very interesting, cool and challenging experiment and I think it should continue! Thank you and congratulations to the Athenoxat-1 team.
- Edson PY2SDR (IARU Advisory Panel Region 2)
We, Athenoxat-1 team, are very encouraged by the enthusiasm expressed by the Radio Amateurs community. Mike DK3WN and Roland PY4ZBZ have taken the initiative to build Athenoxat image decoder to help the community reconstruct the images received via radio packets. It is indeed an exciting experience to be able to work and learn together with people across the world who may eventually become our personal friends.
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Not many people would have bet it two years ago, so now we are very, very happy to celebrate the second year of Athenoxat-1 in orbit. She has been very good and performing very well to our satisfaction. We are grateful to those who have supported her from the very initial idea conception to realizing and helping her growing to be the today's proudful bird in her class.
We are wishing her always a healthy life and wonderful journey to the 100,000 orbits and more, a smooth sailing to the bright Universe and colorful Eclipse. Hear hear... :)
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Field trip! Field trip! Everyone loves field trip, and so do we. We visited a few places and received warm welcome from the community. Everyone was very excited to hear the story of Athenoxat. Interestingly we received similar questions regarding our mother Earth and life in space.
So is it really true that the Earth is flat?
Have you seen aliens by means of Athenoxat?
- Students
We believe Athenoxat and her beautiful experiences and images have inspired the community. It was a really fun trip for us and we are looking forward to doing it again.
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We are very happy to celebrate the first year of Athenoxat-1 in orbit! We presented her first year wonderful images in Singapore Science Centre as well as organized our own party hosted by IMDA PIXEL Labs@NDC and kindly sponsored by Ferrari Food + Wine. We were very honored to have been visited by the representatives of Italian Embassy in Singapore. Of course we were also excited meeting our friends at the party. Lots of food and free flow of Bottega Gold !
Telemetry data from Athenoxat shows very good power budget. There is no shortage of memory storage and thousands of images have been produced and downloaded to our ground station in this one year. So we toasted for the continuing good health of Athenoxat-1 and certainly for many more achievements in Nights and Days imaging. Congratulations and Happy Birthday Athenoxat ! We are very proud of you !
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Here we are again ! SmallSat 2016 in Logan, USA was a perfect place to present the results of Athenoxat-1 that have been achieved so far, due to the large attendance of small satellites producers and users. We presented during the weekend of Cubesat Workshop focusing on the Remote Sensing capability but also touched on the Horizon Detection capability, of which algorithm has been developed in-house. The algorithm works perfectly, capable of determining the correct Nadir Vector based on the fisheye imaging inputs provided by Athenoxat's secondary payload.
How long is the processing time of the Earth horizon detection and nadir determination?
Is the nadir determination done real-time onboard or in ground station?
How much is the exposure time for the main payload?
Those are the questions we received during our presentation Q & A session. It was very encouraging to know how many people are interested in Athenoxat capability. Perhaps we can collaborate with them in the future. But in the mean time, we really had fun experiencing the conference. Informative presentations, good food, good companies, interesting parties, and beautiful landscape ! And oh, our complete article and presentation can be found here.
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Athenoxat-1 is finally in orbit ! She was successfully launched by PSLV rocket C-29 together with the other 5 passengers to the destination of equatorial orbit with 15 degree inclination. Unfortunately due to restriction in photo taking in the launch integration site, we can't show any integration pictures here. But in our free time, we managed to snap some photos of the interesting surrounding of the integration site.
The last few days we had with Athenoxat-1 on Earth were spent carefully and meticulously to check and recheck that all hardware and software settings have been properly configured. Visual inspections as well as health and functional tests were conducted several times to ensure Athenoxat is in her best fit possible. The satellite deployer was also properly measured and tested to ensure it performs correctly as desired. On the last day, we pat goodbye and mounted Athenoxat in her deployer on the rocket head. And lastly we can only wish our Athenoxat may the Universe be with you.
Not long after she was deployed into her orbit, Paulo PV8DX, Mani VU2WMY as well as ourselves confirmed her singing in the Universe telling her name and battery voltage. We were so relieved and excited to start this orbital journey with our beautiful bird. We hope for the best in this mission and may the good Signals be with us all !
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It was my first experience attending the famous gathering of Small Satellites including Nanosatellites & Cubesats community. They have chosen one of the most beautiful places that is a small cute town called Logan in the USA. Beautiful scenery certainly influences the spirit of the people. It started with the weekend Cubesat workshop where many cubesat makers presented their interesting work and results. So not to miss the opportunity, we also presented the results of our first Nanosatellite, which is POPSAT, in the SmallSat Conference, which was held on the next several days after the Cubesat workshop.
We were proud to show that our POPSAT is one of the pioneers that has been able to demonstrate the use of micro-propulsion in the nanosatellite class for the attitude control and maneuvering. We have designed and characterized by ourselves the micronozzles in Microspace laboratory. The micro-propulsion is based on Cold Gas system, which in the case of POPSAT, we have used Argon, which is completely safe for the application thanks to its inert, non-flammable and non-toxic properties. The micronozzle itself is based on Silicon, fabricated with the matured MEMS technology. Our in-orbit demonstration with POPSAT shows that our simple cold gas micro-propulsion system is capable of attaining 43 second specific impulse in average, with total delta V of 5 m/sec based on 7.8 bar initial pressure. Here is where our complete article and presentation can be found. In summary, with the successful in-orbit demonstration of POPSAT, we are now able to say that our Micro-Propulsion unit is at the highest Technology Readiness Level !
Besides presenting our POPSAT results, we had good time enjoying the company of others browsing through their most up-to-date technology products. And when the Conference was over, we certainly did not miss the opportunity visiting the nearby Hill Aerospace Museum and it was the right choice before ending our trip in Utah. Till next year then !
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Our very first nanosatellite POPSAT-HIP1 is now in orbit, alive and singing ! It was a joyful yet a little nervous moment for us since it was our very first experience in having our hard work launched to space. Yesterday POPSAT was launched to his polar Sun-synchronous orbit by DNEPR rocket together with the other 32 satellites. It was a very valuable experience to be able to visit the launch integration site and meet several other teams from different parts of the World.
Besides ensuring a healthy and functional satellite, our main objective being present in Yasny integration site was to perform propellant filling to the propulsion tank of POPSAT. In this launch, POPSAT was the only Nanosatellite having micro-propulsion unit as a payload. It was not an easy task to begin, but with excellent cooperation between us, our launch agent ISL, and the launcher Kosmotras, all went well. And thanks to Kosmotras, we were allowed to take photos of the rocket parts in the integration room.
Due to the nature of POPSAT's orbit, we could only have our very first contact with him 7 hours from his launch time. Thankfully the presence of Radio Amateurs community made it possible to know the health of POPSAT in orbit just in a couple of hours. Mike DK3WN reported POPSAT strong signal over Germany right after the launch and we were very grateful for that. So from today on, our journey together with POPSAT begins !
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