Technology advances and novel businesses are opening up new ways to qualify materials in space. To avoid jeopardizing mission success, manufacturers rigorously test and validate novel materials before using their potentially performance-improving capabilities on customer satellites.
While the International Space Station has become an important tool for experimenting with materials in low Earth orbit, companies are hungry for more accessible and cheaper alternatives to keep pace with rapid evolution in the satellite market.
Enter British startup Space Dots, which raised around $1.5 million last summer to develop a smartphone-sized kit called Barnacle Dot that could be mounted internally or externally on a partner satellite for testing a material’s mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties.
A miniaturized tensile tester that is a key technology needed for Barnacle Dot was recently deemed to be at European Space Agency Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3, the proof of concept stage, following tests reviewed by undisclosed industry space primes.
The technology leverages an advanced material that Space Dots is keeping under wraps, said cofounder James Sheppard-Alden, a former Airbus spacecraft engineer specializing in additive layer manufacturing. He said the patent-pending tensile tester creates a “very understood and measurable force” with “essentially no moving parts” to break open material samples once in orbit and then send raw stress-strain data back to the customer.
“It’s like squeezing the power of a large ground-based tensile tester, which is as big as a washing machine, into just a couple of centimeters,” said Bianca Cefalo, a former thermal product manager at Airbus who also co-founded Space Dots in January 2021.
Commercial space station firm Nanoracks, which already has experience supporting materials research on the ISS, is one of the startup’s partners.
Currently, the industry uses huge Instron…
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