A pair of Rocket Lab-made spacecraft are about to embark on a two-step journey. Step one is the 55-hour, 2,500-mile stretch from California to the launch web site at Cape Canaveral. The second step? Simply 11 months and 230 million miles to Mars.
The target of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission is to check the interplay between photo voltaic winds and the Martian environment. The College of California, Berkeley’s Area Sciences Laboratory (SSL) developed the scientific payloads for the mission, however the satellite tv for pc bus — the precise platform that can journey by means of house and host these payloads in an orbit round Mars — is all Rocket Lab. The mission is at the moment set to launch no sooner than October on the primary launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, in accordance with NASA.
Whereas the corporate is greatest identified for its Electron rocket, which is second solely to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 when it comes to launch numbers, the vast majority of its income truly comes from constructing and promoting spacecraft and spacecraft elements. With ESCAPADE, Rocket Lab is seeking to present each the house company and the world that it could possibly produce extraordinarily high-performance spacecraft which might be able to journeying all through the photo voltaic system.
The corporate proved itself as soon as when it constructed the satellite tv for pc bus for NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Expertise Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission to the moon in 2022. That spacecraft took an almost five-month sojourn into deep house earlier than coming into lunar orbit. However attending to Mars takes considerably longer — and traditionally, it’s additionally been very, very costly. Two latest missions that despatched orbiters across the Purple Planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005 and MAVEN in 2013, every value NASA over a half billion {dollars}.
So in 2019, the house company established the Small Revolutionary Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program to fund small spacecraft missions into deep house. Like different NASA packages established lately, it’s additionally an effort on the a part of the company to embrace danger. As an alternative of spending $550 million on a mission into deep house, NASA set a objective to spend simply one-tenth of that and gave every SIMPLEx mission a $55 million worth cap, excluding launch. ESCAPADE is one in every of three missions the company chosen beneath the SIMPLEx program, and in all chance, the primary that can truly launch.
These funds went to the principal investigator for the mission, SSL, who contracted Rocket Lab for the 2 satellite tv for pc buses. Rocket Lab isn’t saying how a lot of that $55 million went to them, however the lead techniques engineer for ESCAPADE, Christophe Mandy, stated the corporate was “two orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else.”
The spacecraft, named Blue and Gold, are primarily based on Rocket Lab’s Explorer platform (which gained flight heritage throughout CAPSTONE), identified for its excessive delta-v capabilities to assist missions of this sort. One of many greatest challenges for the Rocket Lab engineers was designing a spacecraft that may get from Earth orbit all the best way to Mars; for that cause, the ESCAPADE spacecraft are about 70% gas by mass. That gas will make the spacecraft able to about 3 kilometers per second of delta-v, or change in velocity, which could be very excessive for a satellite tv for pc of this measurement.
The opposite massive problem is that Rocket Lab didn’t know the launch supplier till comparatively late into the design course of, when NASA chosen New Glenn in February 2023. This unknown affected what are referred to as the “driving constraints” for the spacecraft, or the elements that form the engineer’s design choices.
“Almost every single spacecraft I’ve ever seen has had launch vehicle as a driving constraint, but because we didn’t know what the launch vehicle was going to be, we did that differently,” Mandy stated. “So we made an enormous amount of effort to make it so that the launch vehicle was not [a] driving constraint, which is just very unusual.”
As an alternative, Rocket Lab engineers ended up basing a lot of the spacecraft design on one other variable: the utmost quantity of mass the spacecraft can take by means of a crucial maneuver referred to as the Mars orbital insertion (MOI), which is the maneuver the spacecraft will carry out in deep house to enter Martian orbit.
“So the amount of mass we have on the system is driven by physics, rather than by something man-made, like the launch vehicle,” Mandy stated. However as soon as the launch car was chosen, “we didn’t have to do the redesign, because our design was driven by other requirements.”
These constraints helped push engineers to innovate. As an alternative of a field, the 2 spacecraft are principally “tank sandwiches,” as Mandy referred to as them, with two decks related by struts, with the gas tanks within the center. Sometimes, the first construction of a satellite tv for pc accounts for round 20-22% of its whole mass; on ESCAPADE, because of the sandwich design, that quantity is simply 12%.
These modifications have escalating results, Mandy stated: Much less mass within the major construction means much less gas for that, which implies a unique tank measurement, and so forth. Engineers additionally designed the spacecraft so that every one the elements that are inclined to get scorching, just like the flight pc and the radio, are close to the one deck of the spacecraft, whereas all of the elements that tend to get chilly, just like the propulsion system, are close to the opposite. These modifications imply that the spacecraft will want much less energy, smaller photo voltaic panels, fewer heaters, and plenty of different results.
After launch, the spacecraft will spend 11 months touring to Mars earlier than performing that crucial MOI burn. However the solar shall be between Earth and Mars when the spacecraft are anticipated to carry out the burn, making well timed communication with them inconceivable. Rocket Lab engineers must wait one other three months or so earlier than sending a command to the spacecraft to begin circularizing its orbit. Then the spacecraft will accumulate and transmit scientific knowledge again to Earth for round 11 months.
Mandy declined to say the precise launch window for the mission, saying that it’s as much as Blue Origin to find out, however he did say that now could be the height of effectivity for the spacecraft’s journey, and that window extends “through several months after the peak.” If Blue Origin misses the window, the 2 corporations and NASA must wait one other 26 months till the ESCAPADE spacecraft can begin unlocking the secrets and techniques of Mars.
