STARI Preliminary Design Review (PDR)
What is the future of exoplanets detection in the 21st century? Direct observation of planets and their spectral signature requires resolving the planet against the brightness of their host star. Monolithic space telescopes have large costs, and requires huge apertures to achieve reasonable Inner Working Angles (IWA). Nulling interformetery, achieved by means of a distributed space telescope, allows in principle to create distructive interferometric patterns to artificially suppress the brightness of the star making the observation of the planet possible. Moreover, the use of a distributed architecture in space enables large baselines at minimum costs achieving unprecedented IWA.
Last week marked an important milestone in this direction with the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the STARI mission hosted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), NY. STARI consists of two symmetric 8U CubeSats that will operate in a Sun-synchronous Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to simulate one arm of a space interferometer.
The main goal? Demonstrate for the first time in history key technologies needed for deploying a distributed interferometer in Space.
These include: precise, robust and safe formation control capabilities to maintain the Optical Path Difference (OPD) of the telescope below a user prescribed threshold, successfull acquisition and reflection of starlight from one spacecraft to an other at distances of tens to hundreds of meters, and succesful compensating of high-frequency vibrations to enable injection of the starlight into an optical fiber.
On our side, at the Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB) at Stanford University, we are supporting this effort with the development of a Guidance Navigation and Control system that can autonomously handle the stringent six-degrees-of-freedom alignment requirements while interacting with the optical payload and maintaining safety.
STARI is sponsored by the NASA APRA program, and the consortium is lead by John Monnier (PI and Science Lead) at University of Michigan (UM) with Co-PIs James Cutler (UM) and Gautam Vasisht (JPL) for System Engineering, E. Glenn Lightsey (GeorgiaTech) for the development of the Propulsion System, Leonid Pogorelyuk (RPI) for the development of the fiber injection pipeline, and Simone D'Amico (Stanford University) for orbit and Guidance Navigation and Control systems design.
I would like to especially thanks John and Leonid for hosting the PDR at RPI, Akshat Dubey for the heavy system engineering work and flight software discussions, Althea N. and Mark Gorrow on the propulsion side for helping addressing some of the mission critical challenges and finally, last but not least, Ethan Foss and Samuel Low from the SLAB side for the incredible GNC work done to keep the fast pace of the mission.
We are far from the finish line and there is still a lot of work to do. But if a great team is the premise for a successful mission, we are defenitely on the right way. Go STARI!
