Sparsely Braided Composites for Gossamer Deployable Structures

Future space science missions will deploy structures many hundreds of meters long to provide compression columns for solar sails, heat shields and low-cost power production. These structures must be ultra-lightweight, packaged efficiently and be reliable over many years of mission duration. Existing technology is too massive, unreliable, or imperfection sensitive to currently meet these requirements.Foster-Miller will develop a new type of self-deploying, lightweight compression column by fabricating grid works of flexible, high modulus material. This open, isogrid-like structure is essentially a truss where the members are individual fiber bundles. The structure folds extremely compactly by using the flexibility of the composite material to flatten completely without yielding. This open column provides an ultra-light weight structure with the traditional truss advantages; high efficiency, insensitivity to imperfections, and ease of performance prediction. All fabrication is performed on the ground where manufacturing processes can be carefully controlled to ensure peak performance. And, the deployment and stowage of the structure can be repeated many times, allowing the spacecraft system to be thoroughly tested prior to flight. The development of this technology will provide future mission designers with a new alternative with which to produce Gossamer structures and spacecraft.