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

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.

A large number of flight opportunities presently exist for nongovernmental actors to access space – many of these programs and launches are also sponsored by NASA. However these programs are frequently lower cost opportunities that make use of shared or surplus capacity on launch vehicles and satellites. This means that CubeSat and small-sat style launches are often extremely mass and volume constrained and motor controllers such as Honeybee's standard products are orders of magnitudes too large. Miniaturized electronics using SiP technology could be a game changer for these types of programs, as hardware that presently cannot be flown at all due to excessive mass or volume becomes feasible. In addition several high profile commercial space ventures have mentioned planned constellations using very large numbers of satellites in constellation format (e.g. Google, Skybox, WorldVu, and recently SpaceX). Again, such programs by definition take advantage of shared launches to reduce launch costs, and so any technology that can reduce launch mass and volume may translate to enormous reductions in program cost and viability. SiP architecture could prove critical to such ventures. More »