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U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Alex Warren, a Space Systems Operations and Physics student at NPS, and Dr. James Newman, currently serving as NPS Acting Provost, prepare the LED on-orbit payload (LOOP) instrument for optical communication studies aboard the Mola CubeSat. Source: U.S. Navy photo by Javier Chagoya
formed its Department of Aeronau- tics into the Department of Aeronau- tics and Astronautics to complement the SSAG. In 1991, NPS’ Spacecraft Research and Design Center acquired a ground test model Fleet Satellite Communications System (FLTSAT- COM) Navy communication satellite. “This was a milestone for NPS,” said Brij Agrawal, author of Design of Geosynchronous Spacecraft , a textbook used in Space Systems Engineering at NPS. “FLTSATCOM is not a museum piece. It’s operational. Our labora- tory gives students unique access to run experiments and solve problems using a real communication satellite.” A FLTSATCOM in orbit has a 4.9- meter-diameter antenna dish, 13.2- meter-wide solar array, and a launch mass of roughly 2,000 kilograms. However, since NPS’ FLTSATCOM is used inside a laboratory, it doesn’t have a solar array or thrusters.
Expanding the education and re- search opportunities for students in 2010, the Spacecraft Research and Design Center added a six-panel, 3-meter-diameter segmented mirror space telescope, which uses adap- tive optics to precisely control the shape of its mirror surfaces, much like how the James Webb Space Telescope operates. This and other space technologies cross over and enable the develop- ment of nonspace military technolo- gies, such as directed energy app- lications used well within Earth’s atmosphere. Shifting to Satellites and CubeSats NPS has always been involved in launching its own satellites. In 1998, the same Space Shuttle mission that featured John Glenn’s return to space, deployed the Petite Amateur Navy
Satellite (PANSAT) into low Earth orbit (LEO). As NPS’ first satellite, PANSAT allowed Space Systems En- gineering and Space Systems Opera- tions students to develop hardware and communication technology on a 150-pound, low-cost communication small satellite. Given the cost to develop and launch a satellite, NPS also recognized early the opportunities that standard- ized, modular nanosatellites known as CubeSats offered for quick and low-cost design, development, and deployment of payloads into orbit. CubeSats are made up of 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm cubes called units (U). A CubeSat made from only one cube is represented as 1U. If made of three cubes, it would be 3U. NPS flew its own CubeSat, NPS-SCAT, in 2013, an experiment to measure solar cell deg- radation in space.
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