General Purpose Payload Mount for Structural System Identification and Isolation

The Air Force has an operational need to launch satellites on demand for a variety of missions. One critical capability required to achieve this goal is the rapid fabrication and integration of satellites. As spacecraft designs increasingly emphasize small buses and large deployable payloads, it is critical to develop multi-purpose interfaces that can isolate the flexible dynamics of the payload from the bus attitude control system. It will also be crucial to have the capability to identify these payload dynamics during flight in order to diagnose anomalies as well as to verify and tune performance. To enable the rapid integration of payloads using this interface, its design must incorporate simple attachment methods and modular data communication features. We propose to design a general-purpose active payload mount that can be used as an excitation source and/or isolator for a general class of payload, with the Deployable Structures Experiment (DSX) deployed solar array (PowerSail) used as the reference mission for Phase I. Our design of the ISOHEX (ISOlating Hexapod EXciter) is founded on existing PSI technologies and capabilities that include experience in developing active isolation hardware, adaptive control algorithms, and networked data acquisition hardware performed for the DSX program.