A team of NASA engineers has developed a pressurized satellite platform designed to bring off-the-shelf, laboratory-based instruments into space.Engineer Joe Burt led the group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to build the Capsulation Satellite designed to carry approximately 661 pounds of instrument payloads into space, NASA said Tuesday.
Burt said his team developed CapSat in an effort to exploit the rideshare opportunities that could be offered by the U.S. Air Force’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Secondary Payload Adaptor or ESPA ring, which is designed to accommodate and bring up to six secondary payloads into orbit.
The team will use funds from NASA’s earth science technology office to perform a thermal-vacuum chamber test of CapSat’s thermal control system in late September.
Burt also collaborated with Murzy Jhabvala, a detector expert at Goddard, in July to demonstrate how CapSat could accommodate a laboratory version of the Strained-Layer Superlattice Infrared Detector Camera as a flight instrument payload.
