MILLIMACHINING FABRICATION OF CONVENTIONAL GYROS AND ACCELEROMETERS FOR SPACE APPLICATIONS

Micromachining as well as the emerging millimachining technologies coupled with conventional gyro and accelerometer phenomenology can be used to fabricate rugged, reliable instruments for space systems that are integrated with their packages for optimum thermal manangement, electromagnetic isolation from the environment, etc. We propose to apply lithographic processes to the fabrication of conventional, spinning wheel gyros. The gyro design is modified to accommodate such planar processes. The advantages of modularity, high precison, batch processing and automated assembly are expected to yield low-cost, small size, low power instruments with high reliability. In addition, the emergence of millimachining to fabricate structures several orders of magnitude larger than microstructures, yet with the same feature resolution, expands the scope of planar technologies from micrometer to centimeter sized devices bridging the fabrication gap between the micromechanical and macromechanical (conventional) instruments. Gyros as well as accelerometers fabricated by this approach should rival the performance of conventional, inertial-grade instruments on the higher dimensional end of the spectrum. The development approach is to begin with the manageable large size, develop the models and design and proceed with size reduction.