Atomos Space’s first orbital mission is a trial by fire

Few missions more vividly embody the maxim “space is hard” than Atomos Space’s first demonstration mission, which the corporate managed to drag back from the brink of disaster – greater than once.

This demonstration mission, called Mission-1, was launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4. The mission’s goals are extremely ambitious: the 2 spacecraft – an orbital transfer vehicle called Quark-LITE and a goal vehicle called Gluon – will ultimately reveal extremely complex maneuvers, including rendezvous, docking, orbital transfer and in-orbit refueling.

The company faced two major problems related to communication and the rotation rate of the spacecraft – and (largely) solved each problems despite massive limitations, sparse data packets, and very limited bandwidth. (So ​​limited, in reality, that the team needed to limit flight software updates to a text string of just 145 characters).

“It was relentless,” Atomos CEO and co-founder Vanessa Clark told TechCrunch.

William Kowalski, COO and co-founder of the corporate, agreed. “What makes it so difficult is that even in our situation, we’re trying to extrapolate the status of a very complicated system from maybe 100 bytes of data,” he said. “That’s a lot. You guess what’s causing it, knowing that a few of those guesses could lead on you down a path from which you may never get well.”

Problems began just hours after the 2 interconnected spacecraft were launched from the Falcon 9 upper stage. The deployment was nominal, and Atomos received the first signal from the spacecraft seven minutes after deployment. The mood was solemn.

But 40 minutes passed before the corporate received one other signal. Then eight hours.

Atomos expected data packets every jiffy.

“The worst (day) was Monday, when we took off, that evening,” Kowalski said. “It was 11 p.m. at night, it was me and the chief engineer… and we didn’t hear anything and we just think: Have we failed? Did they die? We gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work. It was really a punch in the gut.”

Mission controllers didn’t discover the basis cause until 24 to 48 hours after deployment, and did so with the assistance of one other company with on-orbit assets. After pulling some strings, they managed to speak on the phone to the chief systems engineer of the satellite communications company Iridium. The spacecraft used third-party modems that used the Iridium intersatellite link network and likewise used the Iridium constellation as relay satellites. The Atomos spacecraft was moving too fast and in direct contrast, it couldn’t perform a data “handshake” with the Iridium satellites to truly transmit the knowledge back to Earth.

Atomos engineers implemented a series of software updates that reduced duty cycles and ensured that the radios would all the time be on, even when the spacecraft was in a low-power state.

When engineers tried to resolve the communication problem, nevertheless, they encountered one other problem: the spacecraft was rolling at an especially high rate of 55 degrees per second (they were designed to deal with roll rates of as much as 5 degrees per second). In addition, the spacecraft slowly rotated in order that the solar panels not faced the sun. This meant it was a race against time and the spacecraft’s batteries completely depleted.

“We had two charts,” Kowalski said. “We plotted our power trend for when we predict we will probably be facing away from the sun and have (at) zero power, in addition to the sink rate. The removal rate needed to be delivered to zero before the ability dropped to zero.

The problem was exacerbated by limited communication; teams weren’t in a position to definitively confirm that anything was mistaken until the fourth day after deployment, and the spacecraft could only process recent commands between long periods of what were essentially communications blackouts.

Slowly, over the course of several days, they managed to slow the spacecraft down. The team achieved one other major victory after they were able to ascertain high-bandwidth communications, a space-to-space link on a Quark-LITE device communicating via the Inmarsat network. On Thursday, the corporate made its first attempt at establishing broadband connectivity and successfully maintained communication with the spacecraft for six minutes.

During this era, mission controllers received 17 times more data than since launch. As a result, mission controllers received enormous amounts of information on the state of the spacecraft. The news wasn’t all positive – certainly one of the OTV batteries was badly damaged by aggressive cycling and it appears the GPS aboard certainly one of the spacecraft needed to be reset – but these are easy fixes, Clark said.

The company plans to begin commissioning the drive system on Tuesday or Wednesday. If all goes in response to plan and engineers determine that the support system provides accuracy and aiming control, they are going to test operation without torque bars and response wheels. The company intends to deploy the spacecraft inside about a month, with all mission objectives expected to be achieved by the top of June.

Kowalski and Clark attribute a part of the startup’s success to the incontrovertible fact that it is highly vertically integrated. The team, which worked 100 hours per week within the first week after deployment, was in a position to use their in-depth knowledge of spacecraft design to resolve emerging problems.

“It was obviously very painful, but it is reminiscent of the words of the CEO of Nvidia: ‘I wish you great suffering.’ We went through it and it wasn’t great at the moment, but now that we’ve gotten there, we’re definitely better,” Clark said.