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Analysis and Growth of Interstellar Photo voltaic Sails and the Quad Confinement Thruster
Audio system: Debdut Sengupta and Aaron Knoll, Imperial School London
Wednesday, Could 14, 2025
10:00AM-11:00AM Pacific Daylight Time
The MS Groups hyperlink to the webinar shall be posted right here shortly earlier than the beginning of the webinar.
Please contact Julianna.L.Fishman@nasa.gov if you happen to expertise points with the audiovisual connection to this webinar.
Summary: Whereas maturing SmallSat propulsion applied sciences by flight testing, engineers typically must make a tradeoff between danger conservativeness and failure tolerance. This speak will focus on two applied sciences for which this tradeoff has needed to be made: Photo voltaic Sails and the Quad Confinement Thruster.
Venture Svarog is a student-led initiative at Imperial School London aiming to ship a CubeSat to interstellar house utilizing photo voltaic crusing expertise. To perform this, the CubeSat will make use of sun-diving maneuvers, the place the perihelion is steadily lowered whereas the aphelion is raised with the assistance of photo voltaic radiation stress, till the sail reaches an escape trajectory. The primary half of this speak will current the teachings realized from the testing of an built-in prototype of the photo voltaic sail at 27km altitude in October 2024 in addition to the orbital, environmental and structural simulations which have been carried out in preparation for the interstellar mission.
The second half of the speak focuses on the flight demonstration of the Quad Confinement Thruster (QCT) onboard the NovaSAR-1 satellite tv for pc in 2018. The QCT is a novel plasma propulsion expertise developed by a collaboration between the Surrey Area Centre (College of Surrey) and Surrey Satellite tv for pc Know-how Ltd. This thruster has a novel functionality to actively vector the course of thrust utilizing an electromagnetic discipline with out the necessity for mechanical gimballing. Throughout an 8-year timeframe, the idea was progressed from an idea on paper to a fully-fledged flight mannequin. Whereas this may be seen as a crowning achievement for a college discovery, the story of the QCT reveals potential pitfalls and classes realized alongside the trail from a college lab to business exploitation.
Bio: Debdut Sengupta is a remaining 12 months grasp’s scholar finding out Aeronautics with Spacecraft Engineering at Imperial School London and the Technical Lead of Venture Svarog, a student-led photo voltaic crusing CubeSat mission aiming to ship the primary civilian object to interstellar house. Throughout his time at Svarog, Debdut has led the event of an in-house six degree-of-freedom orbital propagator with AI-based optimizers and has co-authored papers on house crusing within the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and Progress in Aerospace Sciences. He’s at present interning at NASA Ames Analysis Middle within the Small Spacecraft Methods Digital Institute.
Aaron Knoll is a Reader (Affiliate Professor) in Spacecraft Engineering inside the Division of Aeronautics at Imperial School London, and Head of the Imperial Plasma Propulsion Laboratory. Aaron obtained his Bachelors of Aerospace Engineering (2003) and a Masters of Utilized Science in Aerospace (2005) from Carleton College, Canada. Aaron was awarded his PhD in Mechanical Engineering (2010) from Stanford College, USA, the place he was concerned with the analysis of instability pushed electron transport inside Corridor Thrusters. Earlier than becoming a member of Imperial in 2017, Aaron labored as a post-doc researcher (2009 – 2012) and Assistant Professor (2012 – 2017) on the Surrey Area Centre, College of Surrey, UK. The main focus of Aaron’s analysis at Imperial is in direction of the event of spacecraft propulsion applied sciences utilizing different propellants, and novel computational strategies for modelling plasma methods. Aaron is at present on a analysis sabbatical inside the Mechanical Engineering Division at Stanford College, engaged on purposes of the reduced-order particle-in-cell scheme.
S3VI encourages the neighborhood to submit questions earlier than the webinar to allow extra directed responses. Please ship inquiries to craig.d.burkhard@nasa.gov.
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