When the Department of Energy's 90-pound FORTE reached orbit after its 8:00 PDT liftoff from the California desert this morning, it became the first all-plastic satellite in space.
FORTE, which stands for Fast On-Orbit Recording of Transit Events, was assembled in much the same way a child might put together a model airplane. Parts for the craft arrive from the manufacturer, Composite Optics, cut into sheets of graphite-epoxy, a composite carbon material used in Earth-bound implements such as tennis racquets. A team of five technicians separated the hundreds of pieces from these sheets and snapped them together to build the frame.
Although this exercise takes roughly the same time it takes to put together a satellite out of aluminum - 10 weeks - and, in some cases, costs more to build, it's worth it for satellite construction in the long-run, said Gary Tremblay, business area manager for electronic packaging with Composite Optics.
Building a satellite the size of FORTE from the composite materials can cost as little as US$60,000 and as much as $300,000, Tremblay said. By contrast, a FORTE-sized satellite made from aluminum can cost around $50,000 and up to $200,000. But the manufacturing of the composite material and the snapability of the parts of satellites lend themselves to mass production, which could bring the overall cost of building a satellite down, Tremblay noted.
Additionally, the material's lighter weight gives satellite builders a choice of priorities. For scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the 50 pounds of weight saved in building FORTE's frame gave them the option of adding more scientific instruments; they�ve placed roughly 360 pounds of instruments on the craft. These instruments, which include sensitive optical sensors and advanced radio frequency receivers, will help FORTE sift through Earth noise to pinpoint weak radio frequency pulses and light flashes, telltale signs of nuclear explosions. FORTE's mission is to monitor compliance with nuclear test-ban treaties.
"We're trying to get as much capability as we can on board for this test, but we're not trying to test the limits like sending up the lightest spacecraft ever," said Steve Knox, FORTE project leader.
By tipping the scales at lower numbers than ordinary satellites, graphite-epoxy craft also give builders the option of adding more days to a mission, a potential boon for the budding communications satellite industry. Shaving a pound from a craft can add a day or two of orbit time, and that means more revenue, said Tremblay.
"That would make the investment of extra money to get light-weight materials worthwhile," he added.
And the new communications satellite industry is taking note. Tremblay said all the major players in this field have contacted Composite Optics about working together on satellite design, but he would name only one company as a client - Lockheed Martin.
