SBIR-STTR Award

Our purpose is to give government decision makers as well as satellite industry operators and designers a tool for assessing and mitigating space weather effects on satellites. Satellite engineers employ a variety of strategies to safeguard their assets from space weather but avoiding all impacts is not feasible. One consequence is that satellites quickly become electrically charged. Resultant breakdowns and discharges may damage solar arrays, cause false commands, and damage components. What drives the need for space weather tools now and a new market for services is the expansion and evolution of the industry to emerging areas such as satellite internet. Our two-step objective is to 1) engage in deep-dives with industry leading operators to uniquely develop our understanding of their specifific needs and 2) build a prototype tool that connects an advanced global radiation environment model and measured data with engineering codes and methods used to defifine hazards to specifific satellite structures in real time. Our value proposition is this: For operators, designers, and decision makers who need to maintain mission operations and resolve unavoidable satellite anomalies, our product is a tool that summarizes space weather impacts to your assets so you can take the right mitigating action.

The purpose of this project is to develop a Satellite Charging Assessment Tool (SatCAT) that will provide satellite operators/manufacturers with information to quickly and confidently determine whether anomalous satellite behavior observed on orbit results from changes in the space radiation environment. The intense radiation surrounding Earth can damage electronic components causing temporary malfunctions, degraded performance, or a complete system/mission loss. Understanding whether space weather is the cause of such problems expedites investigations and guides successful design improvements resulting in a more robust satellite architecture. Discussions with satellite industry stakeholders held during phase 1, revealed that some space weather related anomalies may go unrecognized and unaddressed, in part, due to a lack of tools for rapid root cause attribution. Real time algorithms addressing this need that calculate how a satellite charges due to the radiation along any orbit for user specified architectures were developed during phase 1. The next phase of the project will expand on that development and advance the usability, reliability, and quality of the system by adding needed enhancements, validation, and testing. The SatCAT application is an innovative solution to satellite industry needs that goes beyond other available information by translating the radiation environment to actual engineering effects