T-1 Month to Launch

How’s that for an intro?

Launching in a Month

If you’ve worked in the space industry long enough, you’ve heard someone say the adage “space is hard”, usually from someone who’s seen some things.

The phrase is used by engineers in day-to-day development of the space technology (along with a few other choice phrases that can’t be repeated here), but also alludes to the make-or-break moment of launch. The instant those rocket engines switch on, you enter into a ultimatum with the universe where you exchange:

• A highly-specialized, super-expensive piece of space-grade hardware, usually a culmination of years of work, thus representing the collective hopes and dreams of your team or company.

And in return, you receive:

• An overwhelming combination of both euphoria and existential dread, forcing you to make peace with that fact that you’ve done all you can and now you can only hope or pray to a deity of your choice.

Clarity-1 Progress

We’re talking about practice

While Allen Iverson may not have needed practice, we most certainly did. Our practice comes in the form of our environmental test campaign, the final readiness test before launch. Of the various encompassed tests, two are of particular importance: vibration testing (”Vibe”) and thermal vacuum (”TVAC”) testing, which serve to simulate the extreme forces imparted during launch and thermal cycling in the vacuum of space.

When the process of vibration testing was first explained to me, it sounded almost too simplistic for what it intended to achieve.

So, you’re telling me — we use “test fixtures’ to strap our satellite onto a “shaker table” and proceed to shake the living hell out of it?

Sounds more like a medieval torture technique than a proven risk-reduction technique, but you can’t argue with the results. The test uses the setup described above to run through three types of vibrations: sine, random, and shock — all types of no-joke magnitudes of forces originating from the rocket itself or the rocket piercing through the atmosphere. Many space programs have reaped the benefits of vibration testing and made critical adjustments, including the JWST. For us, no critical adjustments were needed, but we did gain valuable characterization of our full suite of isolation & dampening systems used for capturing our pristine image quality.

If you’ve had the pleasure of seeing the 1993 masterpiece Demolition Man — congrats, you pretty much get the gist of TVAC testing. At the beginning of the movie, Sylvester Stallone is lowered into a chamber and subjected to immense cold to be cryogenically frozen. Similarly, Clarity-1 was put into a sealed vacuum chamber to recreate the near-zero atmospheric pressure of space and on-orbit temperature cycles of direct sunlight (+150°C) and shadow (-170°C), using thermal plates and nitrogen-cooled panels.

The point of all this vigorous shaking and temperature wizardry is to not only identify any potential workmanship issues not captured in previous tests but also to ensure our internal electronics, sensors, and mechanical assemblies function properly to capture 10 cm imagery — in our words, survive and thrive.

TLYF — Test like you fly

Like we mentioned above, TVAC/Vibe is not just about optimizing for our structural success on orbit but also our mission success. Our electronics and software must continue to function seamlessly without skipping a beat, even as they are subjected to the violent frequencies and the hellish temperatures they were designed for.

To do this, we practice (there’s a theme here) by running custom testing scripts that exercise all of various groups of hardware in concert, everything from a single thermistor to our specialized actuators. We’ve already hit over 2000 hours of testing between overnight testing to prepare for environmental test, our completed environmental test campaign, and now in the final days before shipping to the launch site. Throughout this schedule of testing, the team has also put itself through the operational paces of software releases to align with the expected testing cycles, ensuring we’re programmatically testing the right things.

At the macro level, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time getting launch rehearsals under our belt. These proactive rehearsals simulate the mission operations environment of launch by putting our operators in the driver’s seat while we walk through everything that happens after launch: tip-off, making first contact with Clarity, and commissioning and calibration. It’s a sight to behold — Barb, our VP of Eng leading missions ops, continually smashes the Random button to generate new scenarios and anomalies while the team juggles everything to solve issues on-the-fly.

Practice makes perfect 🎯

Always Mission-first

Approaching our imminent launch in a month, the team is feeling confident — both from our rigorous testing and rehearsal campaigns and the validation we’ve been doing that confirm our precision required to collect 10cm resolution imagery.

Over the past few months, the team has added layers of robustness and additional validation to our end-to-end system, including but not limited to:

• Proved the convergence of our precision pointing and attitude estimation algorithms through closed loop testing. Attitude = Clarity’s pointing orientation, essential to our image capacity and image quality.

• Validated our GNSS (GPS data) processing chain against flight collected data from previous scientific VLEO missions like GOCE, resulting in sub-meter residual difference. In other words, we ran previous data collected from those missions and determined there was less than a meter of difference between our results and theirs. Not bad, especially without any on-orbit adjustments!

• Our end-to-end thrust planning, scheduling, and command execution loop is fully operational — meaning we have our crucial ability to freely manipulate our thrust plans in VLEO.

• Remember that image of that dollar bill we took in the September update? Well, that one was directly off the sensor. We now have the ability to capture that image, run it through all of our satellite’s electronics, packetize, encrypt, transmit it via our radio, receive it on the ground to perform the inverse of all of that, and finally convert those bits into an actual image product. Voila!

Saying Goodbye (for now)

Soon, we’ll have to say our farewell to Clarity-1 as we send her off to the SpaceX launch site in Vandenburg.

I’d imagine this is how parents feel when they send their kids off to college: you dedicate your life to raising them and live side-by-side with them for years, only to drop them off at their first step into adulthood, calling and texting them every so often but they’re busy figuring out who they are in a brand new world.

Wait, why am I crying?

Next month is T-0 — see you at the launch pad 😉 🚀