Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Sneak peek at the Cygnus spacecraft

This full scale model of the Cygnus spacecraft is being set up outside our office in preparation for the stockholder meeting tomorrow. The real Cygnus is my main project these days, with about 80% of my team working on this program. It's very impressive to finally see it in real life, even if it's just a mockup.
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posted by ben @ 6:15 PM   4 Comments

4 Comments:

At April 22, 2010 at 7:55 AM , Anonymous Nicole said...

COOL!

 
At April 22, 2010 at 11:37 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Neat.

My understanding is that Cygnus is a resupply module for ferrying supplies to the ISS. Why then would it need solar panels? I would expect it would be launched into orbit on top of some rocket, use its own thrusters to autonomously dock with the space station, the crew would transfer whatever supplies it carried and fill it up with garbage, then it would move itself away from the space station and eventually burn up on re-entry to the atmosphere.

I suppose it would need electrical power for its own systems as it maneuvers in orbit, but its lifetime is so short that wouldn't a battery or fuel cell suffice?

-NH, rocket scientist wannabe

 
At April 22, 2010 at 4:27 PM , Blogger ben said...

It can take a couple days to reach the station, and also may need to loiter near the station. When you do a trade study to compare the mass of the batteries needed versus the mass of the solar arrays the solar arrays win. Mass is probably the most important aspect of any spacecraft, and affects cost much more than engineering time. I don't know how much a fuel cell would weigh, but its complexity and risk would probably make it much less desirable than simple and well-understood solar panels. Even the Russian's Soyuz spacecraft uses solar panels. I've seen a spacecraft with a 24-hour design life use batteries (lots of them), but anything longer than that usually opts for solar energy.

 
At April 23, 2010 at 2:15 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cool, thanks for the lesson. The solar panels look so fragile to me, and they have to be folded up and then deployed in space, it felt like batteries would be less prone to problems, but I can see how mass would be more important.

-NH

 

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