Recent Patents on Space Technology - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) plays an important role in soil fertility, complex water and nutrient exchange processes in plant root zone, land degradation and global carbon cycle. Space technology is an efficient tool to: 1) estimate and map the SOC stocks and 2) rectify the stakeholders for enough food production and climate change management. Several studies and patents have reported complimentary results and successful applications of remotely sensed data for estimations of SOC at different resolutions, techniques and approaches. However, the results are susceptible to: 1) remotely sensed data quality and technical efficiency, 2) sufficient number of samples representing variability of soils and land use, 3) suitable methods and techniques selected for laboratory analyses of sampled soils, and 4) selected methods and techniques for calibrations of spectra. Therefore, reported success studies are very site-, image- and situation-specific and insufficient to reach at global conclusions. The field is new, active, attractive, challenging and interesting area of research for soil fertility and climate change management.

Effective, self-sustaining ‘vacuum technologies’, such as magnetron-enhanced plasma deposition processes, may be realized in virtually open space separated from the cosmos by a flexible gas barrier inflated by the functional gas pressure required by those processes. The key challenging aspects of the design and functioning of Ultra-low-pressure (ULP) inflatable structures, as well as their structural integrity in space environment including micrometeoroid attacks, are addressed on a quantitative level, and the main parameters are defined. It is shown that the transition from argon to xenon as a functional gas of vacuum technology would improve the gas barrier functionality of the ULP inflatable structures by one to three orders of magnitude. In conjunction with the recent advances in technology of elastomers, this makes the ULP inflatable structures already realizable and practical. The article includes brief analytical reviews of the recent research and patent publications in the relevant fields from the aspect of ULP inflatable structures.

Small satellite power is a critical space segment resource that is at a premium. This is especially obvious when considering highly adaptive small satellites (HASSs) that exhibit static and active (dynamic) power regimes. Reconfigurable spacecraft modules and subsystems have been patented spanning core bus, payload, propulsion and deployment interface. The majority depends on static power margins for specific mission requirements. This paper reports a system-level power budget (PB) model for the HASS system. It beacons on the power-to-mass ratio, payload power requirement, adaptive device technology used, power contingency factor and core bus subsystem power consumption. Spacecraft power estimating relationships (PERs) that satisfy the next-generation small satellite system engineering requirements have been developed based on past missions. A case study of a meteorological mission in low earth orbit is presented. Furthermore, field programmable gate array power regimes measurements were done to assess the power requirements of the active device. 90 mW of differential dynamic power was observed to represent 2.8 % of a 5-kg highly adaptive small nanosatellite power margins in low earth orbit (LEO). The presented results reveal that the HASS power margin must be at least equal to the designed maximum baseline power margin. A space mission can be stalled if the inorbit dynamic power increases beyond the designed maximum allowable power margin. The proposed HASS PB model enhances the design of reliable and high performance solar panels at first sight for deterministic space operations.

The Doppler Asymmetric Spatial Heterodyne (DASH) spectrometer concept was first proposed in 2006 for measuring Doppler shifts of single or multiple, near monochromatic signals and specifically for the passive measurement of atmospheric winds in planetary atmospheres. DASH interferometers have since been proposed, built and used for the passive remote sensing of Doppler shifts of naturally occurring, telluric airglow lines to infer thermospheric winds. In particular, ground based measurements have been conducted and a space based DASH instrument payload for measuring thermospheric winds from low earth orbit is currently part of a NASA Explorer mission Phase A study. Up to now, DASH interferometers have only been implemented and proposed for instruments that perform passive detection of naturally occurring thermospheric airglow. Using DASH interferometers within the active detection system of a Doppler wind Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system was recently patented in the United States of America. This paper briefly explains this concept and its potential advantages.

An analysis of the patented technology related to the use of conventional sources of energy is presented and the benefits offered by renewable energy systems are outlined. Current trends of patents on energy conversion technology show that the combination of two or more different forms of energy could surpass the limits of each individual conversion cycle. Photovoltaic solar cell tandem with thermoelectric generator is one of the examples. Thermal portion of the solar energy can be also extracted with a thermoelectric device to generate electricity. In the paper two types of solar thermal collectors (thermoelectric layer under the photovoltaic solar cell layer and thermoelectric tandem system under parabolic thermal energy collector) with thermoelectric ink and applications are presented. The solar thermal energy systems can be used for a wide range of applications including space mission.

Astronomers tried to detect gravitational waves, which are generated by the movement of massive astronomical bodies. However, it is very difficult to detect gravity waves by using conventional devices. Leon Brillouin proposed a concept of Graser, that is a powerful amplifying device for gravity waves, which can enable us to measure gravity waves, their frequencies, their velocities, and how they propagate. According to the theory by Boyko Ivanov, the gravitational field can be induced by an external electric field for a dielectric material. By studying Ivanov’s formulas, the author has obtained the result that a gravitational wave detector consisting of a dielectric material, which has a higher sensitivity and a smaller size compared with the conventional gravitational detector, can be constructed.