Jane Edwards
A unit of Kongsberg’s defense and aerospace business has received a contract from Los Alamos National Laboratory to build another satellite for LANL’s Experiment for Space Radiation Analysis mission.
Kongsberg NanoAvionics said Wednesday it will make some mechanical arrangements to configure one of its 12U satellite buses to enable the spacecraft to host payloads for the ESRA mission.
ESRA is part of a series of LANL’s Demonstration and Validation missions meant to test next-generation sensors and other key flight subsystems. The spacecraft for the mission will be deployed into geosynchronous transfer orbit to observe the Earth’s radiation belts during the solar maximum.
“The ESRA mission will demonstrate the capability of CubeSats for both science and space weather monitoring beyond low-Earth orbit and serve as a pathfinder for small satellites doing big science,” said Carlos Maldonado, ESRA principal investigator at LANL.
The nanosatellite for the ESRA mission will be equipped with several subsystems and payloads, including the Wide-field-of-view Plasma Spectrometer, Energetic Charged Particle telescope, a high voltage power supply, flight software architecture, distributed processor module and a payload flight processor.
“We are thrilled to be working on our second mission with LANL following the 12U MAMBO satellite. This collaboration underscores the strength of our partnership and NanoAvionics’ commitment to advancing space exploration through its smallsat technology,” said Zilvinas Kvedaravicius, CEO of Kongsberg NanoAvionics.
