Miniaturized System-in-Package Motor Controller for Spacecraft and Orbital Instruments, Phase I

Potential NASA Commercial Applications: NASA maintains a sizable fleet of polar-orbiting and low inclination satellites for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, solid Earth, atmosphere, and oceans. As an example, three of the primary instruments aboard the NPOES/Suomi NPP mission require high precision motor controllers for cross-track observations (ATMS, VIIRS, and CrIS). These instruments will fly again on JPSS-1 and JPSS-2, and the latter will also add RBI, which itself also incorporates high precision scanning action. In all of these cases instruments of these types are heavy, expensive, and complex, and all such missions would benefit from mass and volume reductions in their electronics architecture – both directly from the SiP motor controller as proposed, but also from the development of SiP electronics modules in general. More »