Ramona Adams
The Aerospace Corp. has secured a potential $600,000 NASA grant to develop Brane Craft — a 1-meter square spacecraft that could envelop space debris and remove them from Earth’s orbit.
The nonprofit said Monday Brane Craft was among the 13 concepts that the agency selected for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program which aims to foster the creation of new aerospace technologies to support future missions.
“The Brane Craft concept is based on the one-dimensional compression of a complete spacecraft and upper stage into an essentially two-dimensional object in order to maximize power-to-weight and aperture-to-weight ratios,” said Siegfried Janson, lead investigator on the Brane Craft project.
Janson originally considered small satellites that could take individual pieces of debris down to burn in the atmosphere but found that the concept is “prohibitively expensive,” Aerospace said.
The company noted Brane Craft will be designed to weigh 50 grams, feature a 30-micron thickness and a thrust-to-weight ratio that could aid long distance travels.
The spacecraft will work to travel in any orbit within cis-lunar space, Janson said.
Janson will consider thin film solar cells, electrospray thrusters, electrostatic polymers, thin film transistors and super flat cameras for the Brane Craft, Aerospace said.
NIAC grants include $100,000 for nine months of research and $500,000 for an additional two years if the initial results are deemed successful.
