MakerSat

Small satellite platforms such as CubeSats and nanosats are providing opportunities for NASA, DoD, ad commercial ventures to perform missions at lower cost and improved return-on-investment. There is a growing desire to enable SmallSats to perform "Long Baseline" and "Spatially Diverse" observation, measurement and collection missions. Traditionally, these types of missions would be performed using formation flying or using large, costly satellites equipped with complex deployable structures. For many sensing modalities, fundamental physics demands large apertures or long baselines to achieve the high resolution, sensitivity, and throughput required for these missions. Reliance upon fixed and deployable aperture/mast technologies prevents small satellites from matching traditional large satellite platforms in terms of performance. The proposed "MakerSat Demonstration Mission" effort will develop a third alternative that will enable small satellite platforms to perform his class of missions: "Constructable" technologies, that use in-space manufacturing technologies to enable SmallSats to "grow" significantly larger structures. A SmallSat that, once on orbit, can increase its size from one to two orders of magnitude provides a transformative option to formation flying or deployable structures. "MakerSat" is a low-cost system intended to validate the Constructable SmallSat platform and enable nanosat-class systems to perform missions such as single-pass interferometric SAR, long-baseline radio astronomy, and infrared astronomy.uring the Phase I effort, TUI will develop the Requirements, ConOps and Architecture for the demonstration mission. During the Phase II effort, TUI will develop an EM unit suitable for demonstration and testing Trusselator mission technology. During the Phase III effort, TUI will integrate a FM version of the Trusselator demonstration technology into an appropriately sized SmallSat Bus and fly the MakerSat Demonstration Mission.

While SmallSats have the benefit of small size and mass, making them generally easier and cheaper to launch, fundamental physics demands large apertures and large baselines to achieve high performance in many sensing modalities. The MakerSat technology will enable cost-effective small satellite platforms to conduct these high-performance missions, including long-baseline interferometric SAR, interferometric astronomy, and geolocation. The MakerSat demonstration will establish the flight heritage necessary for in-space manufacturing technologies to be adopted into the critical path for NASA's scientific and exploration missions.

The MakerSat technology will enable commercial SAR ventures such as Capella Space to dramatically increase the performance of their SAR smallsats. It will enable DoD programs to use small satellite platforms to perform multi-ball interferometric geolocation of GPS jammers and bi-static radar systems for EO missions. The MakerSat demonstration will also establish flight heritage for the In-Space Manufacturing technology which is critical to the demonstration of the Trusselator on SSL's Dragonfly mission and the DARPA OrbWeaver program.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 4) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.