Deployable Baffle by SABER System (DeBSS)

Optical payloads are becoming increasingly complex as innovative designs maximize every cubic centimeter available for launch within the expanding range of candidate launch vehicle fairings. Baffles have emerged as critical components on space-based telescopes for enhancing performance by significantly reducing stray light and providing Micro Meteorite and Orbital Debris (MMOD) shielding to protect the sensitive primary mirrors. Heliospace recognizes the growing need for deployable baffle technologies and has begun development on a 1m class tensegrity Deployable Baffle by SABER™ System (DeBSS). The TRL 3 DeBSS design employs a pseudo tensegrity structure aiming to compactly stow for launch and deploy on orbit nominally using Heliospace’s TRL 9 Spiral Actuator and Boom, Extended then Rigidized, or SABER™. The phase 1 proposal seeks to assess the feasibility of a class of deployable space telescope baffles ranging in size from 1 to 7+ meters. Using the described DeBSS as an early development model, technical objectives will aim to identify the risks and solutions involved with managing required cables and membranes that must not present snag risks during deployment. The resulting baffle concept may be highly desirable to spacecraft or optical payload operators around the globe for use in minimizing stray light and added MMOD protection to their payload. Heliospace believes that between the civil, commercial, and defense aerospace arenas, the technology and architecture proposed will have use cases that transverse all sizes of optical payloads. Vetting the inherent configuration and deployment complexities of a DeBSS for a nominal 1m class baffle will enable the development of a minimum viable product that could be marketed today to government and commercial customers. Furthermore, a technical assessment at this scale is precursory to better understand the scalability constraints of similar baffle and structure architectures an order of magnitude larger.