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  Building an uglier spacecraftJun 02, 2011 2:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This NASA article from last week talks about a new technology they're working on for cooling spacecraft (and lots of other things, potentially), called "electrohydrodynamic (EHD)-based thermal control." Instead of using mechanical things like pumps to move coolant near high temperature electronics in order to cool them down, EHD uses electrical fields to move the coolant--no moving parts needed! NASA says the EHD method is more energy-efficient than traditional cooling methods, and can be scaled down easily, to work on really tiny things.
 
Here's a close-up of a little EHD electrical cooling pump:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
That pump is due to go up in a suborbital rocket in June, and that launch is also going to be a demonstration of NASA's SMART satellite platform; SMART ("Small Rocket/Spacecraft Technology") is a 16" diameter "microsatellite," designed to be easy to configure for multiple uses, "and readied for launch in as few as seven days for less than $1 million." This SMART satellite will have EHD cooling, and a SpaceCube computer processor, which NASA says is "25 times faster than the current state-of-the-art microprocessor." Huh! SpaceCube processors have already been on space missions, for instance one was used in an "autonomous docking experiment" during the last Hubble servicing mission in 2009.
 
I went looking for a photo of one of these little SMART satellites, but couldn't find one. Note that they're not to be confused with SMART-1, ("Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology") which was a nifty little Swedish/ESA satellite that went to the Moon in 2003 using an efficient Hall effect ion thruster; Hall effect thrusters use electric fields to ionize and accelerate their propellant, producing thrust, like this NASA one using xenon propellant:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
Compared to traditional combustion rockets, ion thrusters aren't very powerful, but they're highly efficient--SMART-1's was three times as efficient as the best chemical rocket, and was powerful enough to get the 1-meter spacecraft from Earth orbit to the Moon, although it took it about sixteen months to do so. At any rate, they look pretty darn cool. And the SMART-1 mission to the Moon only cost about $170 million, which is pretty decent when you consider that NASA estimates that the Apollo program cost about $170 *billion* (in 2005 dollars).
 
SMART-1 was a sort of ugly cube thing, which you can see on its rocket mounting here.
 
NASA's SMART is also not to be confused with their CubeSat launch initiative, which has proposed to send a number of university created cubesats into space on launch vehicles already scheduled to go up in 2011 and 2012. According to that last link (to Wikipedia), cubesats are 1-liter (10cm cubes, ~1.33 kg; much smaller than the 367 kg SMART-1, or NASA's 40cm diameter SMART) satellites--this seemed to be a useful, efficient size for tiny satellites that can stow away on pretty much any space launch, I guess, and they appear to be popular with academic and research institutions. Various educational, commercial, and international groups have put cubesats into orbit, but NASA hasn't had much luck with the little things: two of theirs were lost in a SpaceX Falcon 1 launch failure in 2008, and three that they were carrying up for universities perished in the same launch failure that killed their Glory atmospheric research satellite back in March of this year. Hopefully NASA's next brushes with cubesats will be more successful!
 
They really gotta start coming up with names other than "smart" and "cube" for things, though. Also, sexier spacecraft designs, please. =P These cubes, however smart, are hard to draw science fiction inspiration from!
 
 
 
 
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