Flexible, Low CTE Composites for Precision Deployable Structures

Future spacecraft will deploy optical apertures large enough to detect life on planets around distant stars. These apertures must maintain their shape to within small percentages of a wavelength over long observations. Current deployment technologies require hinges, latches and actuators, experimentally shown to make structures unstable and unpredictable at the micron level. Compensating for thermal expansion of mechanisms adds cost and complexity and even newly developed, low CTE mechanisms add mass to the spacecraft.Foster-Miller, Kodak and the University of Colorado have teamed to develop low CTE flexible composite materials, enabling the deployment of large, optically precise structures for spacecraft instruments. The team will combine new deployable structures, ultrasonic manufacturing, and low CTE composite design technologies to provide novel, innovative instrument support structures.By incorporating the proposed low CTE flexible composite materials into hinges that are integral to the overall structure, this program will enable the production of instrument structures that can be repeatably deployed on the ground, folded compactly for launch, self-deploy and lock on orbit, and are thermally and dynamically stable. Because the material itself provides the deployment actuation and locking, the structures weigh no more than if they were fabricated as a monolithic, non-deployed structure. (P-020675)