Young Engineers' Satellite 2
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The Young Engineers' Satellite 2 (YES2) was a 36 kg student-built
tether satellite Space tethers are long cables which can be used for propulsion, momentum exchange, stabilization and Spacecraft attitude control, attitude control, or maintaining the relative positions of the components of a large dispersed satellite/spacecraft ...
that was part of ESA's
Foton-M3 Foton (or Photon) is the project name of two series of Russian science satellite and reentry vehicle programs. Although uncrewed, the design was adapted from the crewed Vostok spacecraft capsule. The primary focus of the Foton project is materials ...
microgravity Weightlessness is the complete or near-complete absence of the sensation of weight, i.e., zero apparent weight. It is also termed zero g-force, or zero-g (named after the g-force) or, incorrectly, zero gravity. Weight is a measurement of the fo ...
mission. The launch of the Russian Foton-M3 occurred on September 14, 2007, at 13:00 (CEST) by a
Soyuz-U Soyuz-U ( GRAU index: 11A511U) was a Soviet and later Russian expendable medium-lift launch vehicle designed by the TsSKB design bureau and constructed at the Progress factory in Samara, Russia. The ''U'' designation stands for ''unified' ...
launcher lifting off from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome The Baikonur Cosmodrome is a spaceport operated by Russia within Kazakhstan. Located in the Kazakh city of Baikonur, it is the largest operational space launch facility in terms of area. All Russian Human spaceflight, crewed spaceflights are l ...
in
Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a landlocked country primarily in Central Asia, with a European Kazakhstan, small portion in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the Kazakhstan–Russia border, north and west, China to th ...
. Foton-M3 returned successfully to Earth on 26 September 2007, landing in Kazakhstan at 7:58 GMT. The YES2 project was carried out by Delta-Utec SRC and supervised by the ESA Education Office and was nearly entirely designed and build by students and young engineers. The YES2 deployment took place Sept. 25, 2007. The mission objective was to deploy a 30 km long and 0.5 mm thin tether (made of
Dyneema Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE, UHMW) is a subset of the thermoplastic polyethylene. Also known as high-modulus polyethylene (HMPE), it has extremely long chains, with a molecular mass typically between 2 and 6 million amu. The l ...
) in two controlled stages, in order to release a small, spherical, lightweight
reentry capsule A reentry capsule is the portion of a space capsule which returns to Earth following a spaceflight. The shape is determined partly by aerodynamics; a capsule is aerodynamically stable falling blunt end first, which allows only the blunt end to re ...
called Fotino into a predetermined trajectory to a landing area in Kazakhstan. The scientific objectives of the mission were achieved. The YES2 featured the first multi-stage tether deployment. It could be reconstructed within about 20 m accuracy for the first stage (3400 m) and 100–150 m for the 31.7 km deployment as a whole. The first stage was deployed accurately (about 10–20 m error), the second stage overdeployed by 1.7 km. Fotino released as planned during a swing of the tethered system through the vertical (as seen from Foton). The tether properties, deployment dynamics and tether deployer system performance could be evaluated. The tether deployer performed nominally. However, due to an electrical fault, the on-board computer failed to register the final length correctly and only a partial deployment was initially reported based on telemetry available in real-time. Initial deployment friction was found to exceed the nominal range, revealed by post-mission testing to be most likely due to a thermomechanical settling of the tether spool.ES
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Some weeks after mission completion, analysis of the full data set confirmed that the tether deployed to its full length of 31.7 km. No signal was ever received from the "Fotino" re-entry capsule after separation, and it was lost. YES2 established a new world record as the longest artificial structure in space and was later included in the Guinness Book of Records Edition 2009.


The YES2 project

Most of the work done in this ambitious project (like design, manufacturing and integration) was done by students and young engineers. In total some 450 students participated. Soon after the beginning of the project, four "Centres of Expertise" were created. These were universities which were responsible for parts of the satellite or subsystems. The centres were:
Samara Samara, formerly known as Kuybyshev (1935–1991), is the largest city and administrative centre of Samara Oblast in Russia. The city is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Samara (Volga), Samara rivers, with a population of over 1.14 ...
State Aerospace University, Russia (mission analysis, GPS);
University of Modena The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (), located in Modena and Reggio Emilia, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, is one of the oldest universities in Europe, founded in 1175, with a population of 20,000 students. The medieval university disappeared b ...
and Reggio Emilia, Italy (re-entry capsule); Hochschule Niederrhein in
Krefeld Krefeld ( , ; ), also spelled Crefeld until 1925 (though the spelling was still being used in British papers throughout the Second World War), is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, in western Germany. It is located northwest of Düsseldorf, its c ...
, Germany (tether);
University of Patras The University of Patras (UPatras; , ''Panepistímio Patrón'', ΠΠ) is a public university in Patras, Greece. It is the third-largest university in Greece with respect to the size of the student body, the staff, and the number of department ...
, Greece (mechanical and thermal). Coordination and system engineering was carried out by prime contractor Delta-Utec SRC from the Netherlands. Towards the end of the project, in the manufacturing and integration phase, the work concentrated on the Delta-Utec office in
Leiden Leiden ( ; ; in English language, English and Archaism, archaic Dutch language, Dutch also Leyden) is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Nethe ...
and ESA's ESTEC in
Noordwijk Noordwijk () is a town and municipality in the west of the Netherlands, in the provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland. The municipality covers an area of of which is water and had a population of in . On 1 January 2019, the f ...
, where the satellite was built and tested. The test program included: * electromagnetic compatibility testing in the "Maxwell" EMC test chamber * simulation of space environment in a thermal vacuum chamber *
vibration testing Vibration () is a mechanical phenomenon whereby oscillations occur about an equilibrium point. Vibration may be deterministic system, deterministic if the oscillations can be characterised precisely (e.g. the periodic function, periodic motion ...
on a shake table *
functional test In software development, functional testing is a form of software testing that verifies whether a system meets its functional requirements.ISO/IEC/IEEE 24765:2017, "Systems and software engineering — Vocabulary", International Organization fo ...
s of all components and sub-systems The satellite was handed over to ESA at the beginning of May 2007 and was shipped to Samara (Russia) soon after, where YES2 was mated to Foton-M3 for the first time for test purposes. Afterwards, YES2 and Foton were separated again and brought to Baikonur (Kazakhstan) by train where the whole satellite was completely integrated and mated with the launcher, a
Soyuz-U Soyuz-U ( GRAU index: 11A511U) was a Soviet and later Russian expendable medium-lift launch vehicle designed by the TsSKB design bureau and constructed at the Progress factory in Samara, Russia. The ''U'' designation stands for ''unified' ...
rocket. Foton-M3 and YES2 finally launched on 14 September 2007 at 13:00 (CEST) from the Gagarin launch pad at
Baikonur Cosmodrome The Baikonur Cosmodrome is a spaceport operated by Russia within Kazakhstan. Located in the Kazakh city of Baikonur, it is the largest operational space launch facility in terms of area. All Russian Human spaceflight, crewed spaceflights are l ...
. The main contribution of the project was the demonstration of a complex controlled deployment in two stages. Post-flight, several independent sources of deployment data were collected, including deployment length and rate measurements from YES2 itself as well as highly precise triaxial
accelerometer An accelerometer is a device that measures the proper acceleration of an object. Proper acceleration is the acceleration (the rate of change (mathematics), rate of change of velocity) of the object relative to an observer who is in free fall (tha ...
data from a separate experiment on the Foton carrier spacecraft. These data confirmed that the deployment did progress mostly successfully, in particular the critical first stage and stage transition and the tether deployer performed nominally. The data that was recovered helped to understand the deployer performance and tether dynamics in yet unseen detail, including explicit signatures of sound waves, transverse waves and spring-mass motion. The small
reentry capsule A reentry capsule is the portion of a space capsule which returns to Earth following a spaceflight. The shape is determined partly by aerodynamics; a capsule is aerodynamically stable falling blunt end first, which allows only the blunt end to re ...
Fotino, intended to demonstrate the SpaceMail concept, was not successfully recovered. Calculations based on YES2 sensor data indicate that the landing site should have been in or near the
Aral Sea The Aral Sea () was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan to its north and Uzbekistan to its south, which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up into desert by the 2010s. It was in the Aktobe and Kyzylorda regions of Kazakhst ...
. Alternatively, the capsule, experimental in itself, may have burnt up or crashlanded.


Design of the satellite

There were three main components of the experiment: *FLOYD – the YES2 deployment mechanism located on the Foton spacecraft; *MASS – the Mechanical data Acquisition and Support System; *FOTINO – a small spherical capsule, with a diameter of 40 cm and a mass of 6 kg.


YES2 mission design

During the flight, the FLOYD mechanism ejected the other two components. There was then to be a controlled deployment of a 30 km long tether. Orbital dynamics caused the Fotino capsule to be positioned in front of the mother spacecraft. By bringing the deployment to a halt, a pendulum-like swing was induced. When the capsule and tether swung through the local vertical, the tether was cut. Since the capsule was then going too slowly to stay in orbit, it entered a trajectory to re-enter the atmosphere from an altitude of about 250 km, protected by a heat shield made of novel materials. Once it reached an altitude of 5 km, a parachute was intended to deploy to ensure a soft landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Since data from the Fotino was not downlinked and the Fotino capsule itself was not recovered, it is not known how well the capsule survived the entry.


See also

*
Space tether Space tethers are long cables which can be used for propulsion, momentum exchange, stabilization and attitude control, or maintaining the relative positions of the components of a large dispersed satellite/spacecraft sensor system. Depending on ...


References


External links


Homepage

ESA project homepageYES2 Tether and Re-entry Capsule Fotino Mission AnimationTethers in Space: A propellantless propulsion in-orbit demonstration
- TU Delft Institutional Repository {{European Space Agency European Space Agency satellites Spacecraft launched in 2007 Technology demonstrations Spacecraft launched by Soyuz-U rockets