significant additional equipment or. and support sendees by. the Shuttle Orbiter. The obvious problem with the PIC configuration is that it quite probably requires an attitude control system to properly serve as a “cooperative target’'. Left to a gravity-gradient mode, this object would fly with the torus plane aligned with the orbital plane, i.e. with its smallest section in the direction of the velocity vector. This attitude does not look to good for power beaming from a spacecraft on the same orbit. There might be ways to modify the object’s inertia distribution or to exploit the geometry between the Orbiter and the (essentially) decaying PIC, sensing subsatellite. By the way. the subsatellite is estimated to decay in some 5 days from a 400-km orbit. If the issues associated with using such a directive sensor are found to be insurmountable, then an option would be to “simulate” the spherical geometry, e.g. by an icosahedron truss supporting instrumented membranes. A similar evaluation of such a geometry has yielded a conservative design with 0.8-m member length, i.e. an approximate sphere of 1.5 m in diameter. It is clear, therefore, that the experiment’s requirements for the size of the target” have to be traded against its “omnidirectionalitv”. For the sake of argument, one could suggest that a cubic arrangements could possibly be an acceptable compromise solution. How do such objects scale as a function of the storage volume? If the full volume of a GAS canister could be used, it can be estimated that the PIC’s torus diameter would almost double, while the dimensions of the icosahedron truss could be tripled. Obviously all of the above is intended to get the discussion going. Many
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