VISORS

Virtual Super-Resolution Optics Using Reconfigurable Swarms (VISORS)

Institution PI: Dr. Hyeongjun Park

NMSU Nano-Sat Laboratory is proud to be a joint member in the National Science Foundation funded mission VISORS. The VISORS mission is a multi-university project with the objective of providing high resolution images of the solar corona. These images will provide excellent resources for scientific discovery in coronal heating.

Description

To obtain high resolution images, the VISORS team has proposed the use of two distributed 6U cube satellites flying in a precise formation, the Optics and Detector satellites, respectively. The Optics satellite will house the optics system and have the added functionality of shading unwanted solar radiation from entering the Detector. The Detector satellite will house the detector and fly directly behind the optics spacecraft with a 40-meter separation during observations. Together the satellites will form an ultraviolet telescope as shown in Figure 1.

For more information on the VISORS mission please refer to Georgia Tech's Space Systems Design Laboratory. ssdl.gatech.edu

NMSU's Role:

NMSU works directly with Georgia Tech and Purdue on the ADACS (Attitude Determination and Control Systems) team of the VISORS mission. As a member we provide insight on the nanosatellite's behavior with regards to settling time, momentum unloading, and sensor keep out zones to name a few. Preliminary MonteCarlo simulation results for settling time and momentum unloading during the science phase of the mission are shown in Figure 3.

To obtain the VISORS objective, the stringent pointing requirements shown in Figure 2 must be meet. To verify the pointing capabilities of the ADACS system NMSU has worked extensively in NASA 42 program as well as MATLAB's Aerospace block set. Therefore, NMSU is equipped with various tools with different levels of fidelity. The use of multiple tools will ensure the quality of our results and provide ease of validation.

This multi-disciplinary project will allow NMSU students excellent education as well as opportunities within the field of space engineering. Not only will NMSU students collaborate with students and professors from other universities, but also professional engineers in industry. Collaboration on this project as well as others will solidify the NMSU Nanosat Lab as a key player in space technology development.