Helical Booms for Space Applications

Heliospace Corp. proposes to develop a process to fabricate Helical Booms that will allow a length increase of 85% over similar currently available booms at reduced cost, to greatly increase the speed of optimization and iteration of such boom designs, and to allow much more rapid manufacturing. This will lead to the ability to propose improved deployable mechanism solutions for NASA science missions and other applications requiring deployable booms and antennas. Our work under Phase I utilizednbsp;an in-house prototype fabrication machine tonbsp;develop a process of producing single coils with the necessary properties. In Phase II, enhancements to the fabrication process will enable production of Helical segments of sufficient length and quality to be integrated into functional deployable booms. After a successful demonstration of a Helical Boom, a production grade manufacturing machine will be constructed, and used to make deployable booms that then undergo testing to bring the technology to TRL 6. The results of this work are immediately applicable tonbsp;S1.06 of Focus Area 9, as an enabling technology for particles and fields investigations on NASA Heliophysics missions.