Skip to main content

Taking a High-Resolution Ultraviolet Image of the Sun’s Corona Will Require VISORS

Sometimes, brainstorming does work. In 2019, America’s National Science Foundation (NSF) held the CubeSat Ideas Lab, a shindig that brought together some of the world’s best CubeSat designers. One outcome of that shindig is the Virtual Super-Resolution Optics with Reconfigurable Swarms, or VISORS, mission. Expected to launch in October, this mission will be a proof of concept for many swarming technologies in CubeSats. Hopefully, It will also capture a pretty impressive picture of the Sun’s corona.

VISORS was formally defined in a paper in 2022, with input from experts at nine different academic institutions, one NASA lab, and one private lab. The concept of operations (or ConOps in the paper) is easy enough – fly two separate 6U CubeSats in formation and take an extreme ultraviolet picture of the Sun. 

The obvious question is—why do you need two CubeSats to do that? A single spacecraft could do the job, but the science goal of the VISORS missions is to take an image at a very high resolution in a very specific extreme ultraviolet wavelength. To do that, the mission would need an optical mirror diameter of around 40m.

Fraser discusses how swarms could change how we explore the solar system.

That is beyond humanity’s current capability to fit onto a rocket fairing and blast into space. So, VISORS will actually consist of two spacecraft. One, known as the Detector Spacecraft (DSC), will house an ultraviolet detector, and one, known as the Optics Spacecraft (OSC), will act as an optical system that mimics the characteristics of a 40m diameter mirror.

However, the secret sauce of the VISORS mission lies in the coordination between the DSC and the OSC. They will fly in formation with each other, about 40 m apart, with the OSC placed between the Sun and the DSC. The light from a specific region of the Sun’s corona will pass through a photon sieve on the OSC and be directed into the detector of the DSC 40 m away, effectively creating the effect of a 40m wide mirror without the need for a continuous surface.

The only problem is that this type of coordinated alignment between CubeSats has never been done before. So, really, the VISORS mission could be looked at as a technology demonstration mission for CubeSat swarm formation rather than a heliophysics one. The mission statement in the ConOps paper states that the mission will be considered successful if it captures one ten-second image over the course of a six-month primary mission duration.

YouTube video from the Space REndezvous Laboratory describing VISORS formation.
Credit – Space Rendevzous Laboratory YouTube Channel

Ten seconds out of almost 16 million may not seem like much, but it shows the difficulty of getting CubeSats to align properly at the right time. To do so, researchers at the Space Rendezvous Laboratory at Stanford have created novel Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) software based on a concept familiar to any controls engineer—a state machine.

In software, a state machine is defined by various variables that will change the software’s behavior based on the values of those variables. In the case of VISORS, there will be five different states. Standby is pretty self-explanatory – wait in your current orbit for further instructions. Transfer is an attempt to move into formation to allow the system to capture an image. Science is when the mission will attempt to capture that ten-second image. But if something goes wrong, it also has two recovery states – Safe mode is pretty standard for all spacecraft, but Escape mode is unique for VISORS. This would move either spacecraft out of the way of the other, and collision between the two is one of the primary risks of the mission architecture and one of the things the GNC algorithm is designed to avoid.

Development of that software appears to be ongoing, though the planned launch date for the mission is only three months away. If all goes well and VISORS is successfully deployed and takes at least one picture, that proof of concept will shortly enable plenty more CubeSat swarm missions. It might even inspire more successful brainstorming Idea Labs.

Learn More:
Lightsey et al – CONCEPT OF OPERATIONS FOR THE VISORS MISSION: A TWO SATELLITE CUBESAT FORMATION FLYING TELESCOPE
UT – What a Swarm of Probes Can Teach Us About Proxima Centauri B
UT – Tiny Swarming Spacecraft Could Establish Communications with Proxima Centauri
UT – A Pair of CubeSats Using Ground Penetrating Radar Could Map The Interior of Near Earth Asteroids

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of the VISOR spacecraft flying in formation.
Credit – Simone D’Amico

The post Taking a High-Resolution Ultraviolet Image of the Sun’s Corona Will Require VISORS appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/lwSToCj
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From

Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space. Scientists treasure meteorites because they reveal information about their parent bodies. In an arXiv paper, two Italian researchers—Albino Carbognani and Marco Fenucci—analyze the characteristics of the parent bodies of 20 selected meteorites. They were able to track all but eight back to their parent asteroids. Based on their work, the pair says at least a quarter of meteorites come from collisions that happened in near-Earth space and not in the Main Belt. Meteorites from Near-Earth Asteroids: How They Got Here Many meteorites are chondritic, similar to asteroids in the Main Belt (or came from it). In their paper, the authors point out that progenitor meteoroids (including many that fall to Earth and become meteorites) formed millions of years ago following collisions between main-...
Post a Comment
Read more

JWST Takes a Detailed Look at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede

Nature doesn’t conform to our ideas of neatly-contained categories. Many things in nature blur the lines we try to draw around them. That’s true of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. The JWST took a closer look at Ganymede, the moon that’s kind of like a planet, to understand its surface better. Ganymede is basically a planet, except it doesn’t orbit the Sun. If it did orbit the Sun instead of Jupiter, it would be indistinguishable from a planet. It has a differentiated internal structure with a molten core that produces a magnetic field. It has a silicon mantle much like Earth’s, and has a complex icy crust with a deep ocean submerged beneath it. It has an atmosphere, though it’s thin. It’s also larger than Mercury, and almost as large as Mars. According to the authors of a new study, it’s an archetype of a water world. But even with all this knowledge of the huge moon, there are details yet to be revealed. This is especially true of its complex surface...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life

The field of extrasolar planet studies has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Thanks to missions like Kepler, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and other dedicated observatories, astronomers have confirmed 5,690 exoplanets in 4,243 star systems . With so many planets and systems available for study, scientists have been forced to reconsider many previously-held notions about planet formation and evolution and what conditions are necessary for life. In the latter case, scientists have been rethinking the concept of the Circumsolar Habitable Zone (CHZ). By definition, a CHZ is the region around a star where an orbiting planet would be warm enough to maintain liquid water on its surface. As stars evolve with time, their radiance and heat will increase or decrease depending on their mass , altering the boundaries of the CHZ. In a recent study , a team of astronomers from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) considered how the evolution of star...
Post a Comment
Read more