Spacecraft concept The VIKING platform is proposed as a platform for the laser experiment. The VIKING has the following advantages: it is an existing platform it is cheap it can be launched together with the French SPOT satellite. The combination of VIKING and SPOT has already flown before and is therefore qualified However, after some evaluations it was found that the proposed VIKING platform is incompatible with this type of mission. As a spinner, this platform is designed to be oriented inertially. To point a laser beam this design would have to be changed completely in order to have a 3-axis stabilized spacecraft or a dual spin concept. 5 Conclusions Most of the parameters identified in the technical discussion exceed significantly the given envelopes in terms of cost and schedule: the mission would require significant payload developments for a high power laser in the visible spectrum (time, money, risk) the technology for high precision pointing would have to be developed total spacecraft mass would be in the range of a big telecommunication satellite Despite these modifications it seems to be impossible to carry out a reasonable demonstration experiment with this small amount of money. See also M. L. Gaillard: Open questions in high power laser transmission systems, proceedings of the Solar Power Satellites conference, C.3., p 95 ff, Gif sur Yvette, France, June 5/6,1986. Team members in alphabetical order: R. Bertrand, M. Fahey, R. Haberli, D. Jacobs, P. Kumara, J. Laaksonen, A. Suleman, J. Vidqvist Possibilities to improve feasibility Comment - scale down the experiment by two orders of magnitude to be able to use existing lasers in the visible spectrum - this small amount of power would have no measurable effect on a target satellite - launch directly into graveyard orbit - shorter beaming distance to relax the pointing and aperture requirements - decrease the beam diameter on the target to decrease the laser power needs - higher pointing requirements for the emitter spacecraft - beam scattering
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