Orbit & Challenges

Launch Flight

ABCS will be launched by Vega C qualification maiden from Guiana Space Centre (GSC). ABCS will be one of the secondary payload of the mission, whose primary payload will be LARES 2 satellite. ABCS will be released once reached the target orbit. It will be immediately switched on to start performing the experiments.

Schedule

To date, ABCS will be launched next July, 13th 2022 from (Centre Spatial Guyanais..

Orbit

ABCS will be deployed in an approximately circular orbit, with about 5900 km of altitude and 70° of inclination. It implies that ABCS will spend a significant part of the orbital period within the internal Van Allen belt, close to its maximum.

Challenges and Solutions

Charged Particles

Due to the orbit (5970 km of altitude), ABCS will experience a high flux of charged particles. The main expected effects will be:

• Degradation of the solar panels;

• Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects on the electronics;

• Single Event Effects (SEE) on electronics.

This will affect the ABCS operational life. The main effects to be investigated will be:

• Reagents stability;

• Readout noise.

Thermal Environment

At 5970 km of altitude the albedo and the Earth IR contributions are very low. Thermal simulations performed on ABCS suggest that its inner temperatures tend to be well below 0°C.

Since, a careful thermal design of ABCS was required to ensure the correct temperature inside the payload (which shall be approximately between 4 and 20°C) to prevent the degradation of reagents.

Furthermore, ABCS payload requires an atmospheric pressure environment to prevent fluid evaporation.

Technical Solutions

To ensure the correct environment in terms of temperature and pressure, the idea was to put the payload inside a hermetically sealed aluminum box filled with air at atmospherically pressure and using an active temperature control (heaters).

The main advantages of this solutions are:

• The pressurized environment facilitates heat exchange due to air conduction (no natural convection) and exploits passive thermal control;

• Electronics benefit from the shielding and contributes to heating;

• Batteries operate at atmospheric pressure

The box also provides an extra shielding from radiation and charged particles. The main shielding is provided by thin layers of tungsten, resins and aluminium mounted on ABCS side panels.

References

Burgio, N., Cretara, L., Corcione, M. et al. Modelling the interaction of the Astro Bio Cube Sat with the Van Allen’s Belt radiative field using Monte Carlo transport codes. Radiat Detect Technol Methods (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41605-022-00321-9