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Record W12851918

Small Spacecraft Design for the GRAIL Mission

2012· article· en· W12851918 on OpenAlexaff
Stuart R. Spath

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicSpacecraft and Cryogenic Technologies
Canadian institutionsLockheed Martin (Canada)
FundersJet Propulsion LaboratoryMassachusetts Institute of Technology
KeywordsSpacecraftSpacecraft designAerospace engineeringComputer scienceSystems engineeringEngineering
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

On September 10, 2011, two identical spacecraft were launched from the Kennedy Space Center Space Launch Complex-17B on their 4-month, low-energy trajectory to the moon. The primary objective of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission was to collect a global gravity map of the moon with a resolution approximately 1000 times better than existing knowledge. Lockheed Martin had the responsibility of designing, developing, assembling, testing, launching, and operating the twin spacecraft. With a dry mass of 200.6 kg each, these GRAIL spacecraft were among the lightest ever to be selected for a NASA Discovery-class mission. This paper discusses some of key trade studies performed and the resulting design features of these two small spacecraft. Among the areas of discussion are the following: • Spacecraft architecture and its significant heritage from Experimental Small Satellite #11 (XSS-11) • Increasing the delta-v capability required for the lunar orbit insertion • Solar array sizing for the science collection phase • Mounting position for the Ka-band antenna, one of the key components of the science instrument • Launch configuration trade study: stacked design vs. side-by-side design • Spacecraft similarity trade study: mirror image buses vs. identical buses with a rotated science orientation • Limited redundancy approach and its associated fault protection This paper also discusses some of the on-orbit performance during GRAIL’s primary mission including: • Spacecraft performance and anomalies • Science results from the primary mission • Analysis performed to justify and gain approval for a 6-month extended mission Not only have the GRAIL spacecraft returned a wealth of scientific data, but they paved the way for future Lockheed Martin small satellite applications including an entry in NASA’s Rapid Spacecraft Development Office (RSDO) catalog.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.019
Threshold uncertainty score0.064

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0190.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.071
GPT teacher head0.235
Teacher spread0.164 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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