Millennium Space Systems Celebrates Six
Months of On-Orbit Performance From
ALTAIR™ Pathfinder Spacecraft
Dec. 6, 2017
Millennium
Space Systems announces the successful
completion of its ALTAIR™
Pathfinder mission objectives last week
as the spacecraft reached its six-month
milestone and 4,500 hours of successful
operations in low earth orbit. ALTAIR™
Pathfinder was released via NanoRacks
commercial launch service. NanoRacks
services are made available by its Space
Act Agreement with NASA's U.S. National
Lab. Millennium Space recently received
FCC approval to continue to operate the
mission for an additional six months,
thereby allowing a full year of on-orbit
performance monitoring and technology
risk burndown to benefit the company's
Government space customers.
ALTAIR(TM)
Pathfinder
successfully
deploying its solar
arrays just after
deploying from the
NanoRacks CubeSat
Deployer on the
International Space
Station. Photo
Courtesy of
NanoRacks and NASA.
ALTAIR(TM)
Pathfinder operators
review telemetry
during initial turn
on and checkout of
the spacecraft.
"Since meeting
our early mission objectives in June,
the operations sustainment team has
worked to selectively automate mission
operations to improve lights-out
operations," said Griffith Russell,
Millennium's ALTAIR™ Pathfinder
mission director. Other longer-term
mission objectives matured the
satellite's on-board guidance control
algorithms and perfected loop back
testing using a dedicated flight
computer. Successful on-orbit life
testing reinforces the benefits of
Millennium's decision to vertically
integrate the company three years ago.
By designing and building in-house,
Millennium maintains significantly
better control over cost, schedule,
performance and reliability.
ALTAIR™
Pathfinder leverages commercial space
practices, balanced with the necessary
engineering rigor and discipline to
space qualify new and emerging
technologies, reliably and affordably.
This flight demonstration is only the
beginning,
Jason Kim,
Millennium Space Systems' vice president
of strategic planning explained, saying,
"The ALTAIR™ platform meets
the growing demand for more affordable,
resilient, high tech refresh, schedule
responsive and persistent space systems
and related constellation mission
solutions."
The company
plans to continue the ALTAIR™
Pathfinder mission at least into spring
2018, amassing more flight burn-in
hours, further quantifying component and
subsystem performance, and using it as
an experimental on-orbit testbed to
assess and validate new software and
algorithms relevant to the company's
mission portfolio.
