Flight hardware and software operations performance review for BAMMsat-on-BEXUS – a BioCubeSat prototype flown on BEXUS30

BAMMsat-on-BEXUS is a student-led project in which a CubeSat-compatible payload was designed, manufactured, and flown on the BEXUS30 stratospheric balloon. The prototype payload – BAMMsat (Biology, Astrobiology, Medicine, and Materials Science on satellite) – is a modular CubeSat-compatible miniaturised laboratory termed a bioCubeSat. The core flight objective was to perform technology demonstration of the bioCubeSat technology, demonstrating capability to perform experiments in space, and to understand system performance and identify future requirements. The mission aimed to validate pre-flight, flight, and post-flight operations, with a focus on biological and autonomous operations and the novel payload hardware. C. elegans samples were flown in the payload. The mission was partially successful, as the BAMMsat systems and autonomous software operated successfully despite challenging conditions and a large volume of payload performance data was collected; however there were issues maintaining the viability of the samples during flight and microfluidic system issues that impeded sample containment and imaging operations. Post-flight analysis has been performed, the root causes of the issues identified, and upgraded novel payload hardware is currently being developed and tested

BAMMsat-on-BEXUS: A Technology and Operation Demonstration of a BioCubeSat Platform on a Stratospheric Balloon Flight Educational Program

This paper reports the current use of the REXUS/BEXUS educational program. The program allows university students across Europe to carry out scientific and technology experiments on research sounding rockets and balloons. BAMMsat-on-BEXUS (BoB) is an experiment from Cranfield University and University of Exeter performing a technology and operation demonstration of a bioCubeSat on a stratospheric balloon at an altitude of ~30km above the ground. BEXUS stands for Balloon Experiments for University Students and is realized under an agreement between the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA), European Space Agency (ESA), and EuroLaunch. The term bioCubeSat could be used to refer to a nanosatellite in a CubeSat format with a biological experiment on-board. Over the last decade, a series of six bioCubeSats have been launched into orbit by NASA and a private company, SpacePharma, i.e., GeneSat, PharmaSat, O/OREOS, SporeSat, Dido-2, and EcAMSat. The BAMMsat concept (Bioscience, Astrobiology, Medicine and Material science on CubeSat) is a bioscience hardware platform which aims to advance the current state of the art technology, under development at Cranfield University, for application in LEO and beyond LEO. This generic platform can be flown as a free-flying CubeSat or hosted as a payload on a larger spacecraft. BAMMsat utilizes COTS sensors, actuators, and fluidic components to enable bioscience experiments by reproducing the features in a traditional laboratory into a miniaturized “laboratory.” It is designed to be compatible with the mass, volume, and power budget of a CubeSat payload and flexible for a broad range of applications and biological systems such as microorganisms, nematode worms, and mammalian cells cultures, including human cell cultures. The core features of BAMMsat are the ability to (i) house multiple samples, (ii) maintain samples in an appropriate local environment (ii) perturb sample fluidically, and (iv) monitor samples. BoB aims to perform a technology and operation demonstration of the BAMMsat bioCubeSat payload in an extreme environment such as the stratosphere. The experiment is to be flown on the BEXUS30 flight campaign in October 2020 from ESRANGE Space Centre, Sweden. The stratosphere can be used as an analog of some aspect of a relevant spaceflight physical environment such as reduced pressure (near-vacuum; ~11 mbar), and temperature (-50°C). The BEXUS flight campaign could also be used as an analog of pre-flight, flight and post-flight operation similar to orbital launch campaign. For bioscience experiments, the biological samples often imposed additional requirement during pre-flight to ensure its viability. BoB will house C. elegans in a 2U pressure vessel to demonstrate its functionality to provide a controlled thermal and fluidic environment with appropriate housekeeping control. This functionality reflects the hardware capability to maintain a viable biological sample. BoB has a 3U CubeSat form factor with 2U allocated for the BAMMsat hardware and 1U allocated as the BAMMsat-on-BEXUS bus. This paper reports progress at four months before flight campaign. The paper also discusses an overview of the experiment objectives and systems design, to build a representative CubeSat that is translatable into a free-flying orbital CubeSat

A Modular Hardware and Software Architecture for a Student-Designed BioCubeSat Prototype Using Autonomous Operations

BAMMsat-on-BEXUS is a student-led project aiming to design, manufacture, and fly a CubeSat-compatible payload on a stratospheric balloon. The payload – BAMMsat (Biology, Astrobiology, Medicine, and Materials Science on satellite) – is a modular CubeSat-format laboratory termed a bioCubeSat. The mission is realized under the bilateral REXUS/BEXUS programme run by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA), with the Swedish payload share available to students through a European Space Agency (ESA) collaboration. The core objective of the prototype payload is to perform a technology demonstration of the core bioCubeSat technology, demonstrating its capability to support biological experiments in space. Additionally, the mission aims to validate pre-flight and flight operations, with a particular focus on biological operations. This will increase TRL for future bioCubeSat spaceflight with the goal to eventually enable better and cheaper biological, pharmaceutical, and materials science research in space environments. The BEXUS mission follows a typical space mission framework with reduced timeframe, therefore trade-offs prioritize commercial-off-the-shelf components and simple software using open-source solutions. The payload comprises a 2U pressurized laboratory payload (BAMMsat) and 1U avionics bus. The former contains experiment hardware including a Multi-Chamber Sample Disc, rotary mechanism, imager, the microfluidics system, active thermal control, and supporting avionics. The bus contains two flight computers, multiple custom avionics PCBs, and serves as the interface between BAMMsat and the BEXUS balloon gondola. The BAMMsat-on-BEXUS prototype will likely fly in October 2021. The prototype flight should prove that the system can perform varied microfluidics operations on multiple C. elegans samples, capture detailed imagery of the samples, provide general system housekeeping and communications, and provide life support for samples, including stable temperature and pressure despite operating within an extreme temperature and near-vacuum environment. The system and biological operations are designed to be fully automatic during flight, with some subsystems continually autonomously operating and others following sequenced events. Future work will aim for greater use of autonomous operations to reduce operating costs and enable more advanced system control, particularly for precise active thermal control and experiment sequencing. The next iteration of BAMMsat is targeting low Earth orbit missions, after further hardware upgrades and the inclusion of fluorescence microscopy and additional chemical sensors

Spatially resolved scattering metrology to quantify losses induced by contamination and defects

International audienceIn less than 20 years, extraordinary progress has been made on the design and manufacturing of planar optical components, especially in terms of minimizing light scattering (a few 10^-6 of the incident flux). This progress is closely linked to polishing techniques, which allow to obtain, on amorphous substrates, roughness lower than a fraction of nanometer in the optical frequency window. Moreover, with modern filter manufacturing technologies, the roughness of the substrate is reproduced almost identically by each of the thin layers constituting the stack.However, at this level of qualification, new problems and concerns arise, in particular the presence of localized defects in the component. These defects are of sub-micron size and appear during the manufacturing of the filters. Their density is low (less than one defect for a 100 micrometers diameter disk), so for conventional components, their contribution can be neglected. However, for Space optics and gravitational waves detection, the impact of these isolated defects can become dominant in the light scattering process and its accurate quantification remains a challenge. To address this problematic, the CONCEPT Group of the Institut Fresnel developed a SPatially and Angulary Resolved Scatterometry Equipment (SPARSE). The principle of the instrument is based on the coupling of imaging abilities with a scatterometer. It is designed to record up to 440 thousand BRDF with a single measurement on a one inch diameter component. A beam shaping arm is added to tailor the illumination to the shape of the component and to offer the capability to “turn off” defects in order to increase the detectivity. SPARSE allows the measurement of scattering level as low as 10^-8 sr^-1$ and the data processing is designed to discriminate and quantify the weight of localized defects, contamination, scratches and roughness in the scattering budIn less than 20 years, extraordinary progress has been made on the design and manufacturing of planar optical components, especially in terms of minimizing light scattering (a few 10^-6 of the incident flux). This progress is closely linked to polishing techniques, which allow to obtain, on amorphous substrates, roughness lower than a fraction of nanometer in the optical frequency window. Moreover, with modern filter manufacturing technologies, the roughness of the substrate is reproduced almost identically by each of the thin layers constituting the stack.However, at this level of qualification, new problems and concerns arise, in particular the presence of localized defects in the component. These defects are of sub-micron size and appear during the manufacturing of the filters. Their density is low (less than one defect for a 100 micrometers diameter disk), so for conventional components, their contribution can be neglected. However, for Space optics and gravitational waves detection, the impact of these isolated defects can become dominant in the light scattering process and its accurate quantification remains a challenge. To address this problematic, the CONCEPT Group of the Institut Fresnel developed a SPatially and Angulary Resolved Scatterometry Equipment (SPARSE). The principle of the instrument is based on the coupling of imaging abilities with a scatterometer. It is designed to record up to 440 thousand BRDF with a single measurement on a one inch diameter component. A beam shaping arm is added to tailor the illumination to the shape of the component and to offer the capability to “turn off” defects in order to increase the detectivity. SPARSE allows the measurement of scattering level as low as 10^-8 sr^-1 and the data processing is designed to discriminate and quantify the weight of localized defects, contamination, scratches and roughness in the scattering budget. We propose in this paper a detailed description of the set-up with its metrological qualification and some examples of measurements performed on representative Space Optics.get. We propose in this paper a detailed description of the set-up with its metrological qualification and some examples of measurements performed on representative Space Optics

A new spatially and angularly resolved scatterometer

International audienceWe present the main improvements to a scatterometer developed at the Fresnel Institute allowing the spatially resolved recording (up to 1 million elementary pixels) of the light transmitted or scattered by a plane sample