Launching satellite technology: Illinois researchers ready for MSAC satellite test flight

Illinois innovators are set to launch their patented Multifunctional Structures for Attitude Control, or MSAC technology, for a crucial test flight in October. This game-changing technology precisely rotates a satellite, or other spacecraft, in any direction.

While technology for reorienting spacecraft already exists using expensive and bulky flywheel-based systems, MSAC vibrates the satellite’s existing solar panels in a circular motion to simultaneously rotate it to a desired orientation and cancel out mechanical vibration, or what’s known as jittering, to significantly reduce both the size and mass of satellites. This helps capture clear imagery and provides quality data for high-value applications such as oceanic weather forecasting, soil moisture mapping, exoplanet exploration and optical communications.

“It’s kind of like what a cat does,” said James Allison, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering associate professor at The Grainger College of Engineering who co-invented MSAC during his work on the Strain Actuated Solar Arrays platform, which is used for precise positioning, better known as attitude control, of a space craft using control algorithms and a high fidelity hardware-in-the-loop platform to test the control algorithms creating a scaled prototype.

“If a cat falls out of a window, how does it reorient itself and land on its feet?” Allison asked. “It uses its limbs to rotate its body. If it wants a net change in rotation, it needs to pull its limbs back in before it rotates back.”

SASA tech development began in 2013 with seed funding from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory related to a general lab-wide program that invested in promising high-impact technologies. Hopes for the research entailed Illinois researchers being able to eliminate jitter onboard its satellite seen in flywheel-based systems dependent on sliding contact mechanical bearings. Flywheels are both a source of vibration and reliability challenges.

“Thrusters can work to overcome some of the drawbacks of flywheel-based systems, but they introduce their own issues,” Allison said. “They require fuel, so there’s a time limit.”

Previous technology caused NASA mission failures, including the Kepler space telescope mission, which sought to locate Earth-sized planets orbiting stars just outside our solar system.

Allison’s group of undergrads and grads alike began plugging away at developing SASA, helping him secure NASA Undergraduate Student Instrument Project, Small Business Technology Transfer/Small Business Innovation Research and National Science Foundation awards as well as collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center.

It was the ISE researcher’s doctoral student Vedant, an ’18 and ’21 aerospace engineering alum, who elevated SASA to the next level, co-inventing MSAC and making it the focus of his thesis.

Vedant went on to co-found Samara Aerospace alongside fellow Grainger engineer Patrick Haddox (’14), developing the Hummingbird spacecraft bus, which is a 100 to 500-kilogram satellite bus that aims to take flight for its technology demonstration mission in late ’26 or early ’27.

“We have a few potential customers already signing on as experimental payloads to test drive the vehicles,” Vedant said. “If that goes successfully, we have some letters of intent and (folks) who would like to purchase many of our satellite buses as they’ve sent in conditional pre-orders.”

This is a huge feat for the Illinois researchers, as the demand for the satellite technology is great with approximately 110 pre-orders — a tall order to create its first delivery in three years’ time. Early on, Illinois’ Office of Technology Management helped get the attention of bigger aerospace companies.

Extraterrestrial capabilities aren’t MSAC’s only perks. Here on planet earth, the technology shows promise in holding optics very still, like in extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is crucial in semiconductor manufacturing using light to create intricate patterns on silicon wafers to help create complex integrated circuits.

“These things are being manufactured on such a small scale that just vibrations from tectonic plate movement — not like big earthquakes, but things that are undetectable to humans — can throw these machines off,” Allison said. “So having precision motion control systems could be very helpful in taking semiconductor manufacturing to the next level.”

Vedant’s focused on ensuring MSAC technology reaches its necessary level eight on the technology readiness level standardization, which determines how ready a technology is for commercial use.

“Eight is when you’ve shown it in the low earth orbit that it works,” Vedant said. “Once it’s TRL eight, at that point, it’s past NASA and the DoD (Department of Defense) sniff check, which is more than enough for commercial partners to start considering this as a feature that they would like to include in their offerings.”

T-minus five months until this Illinois technology launches into space for its flight test.

“I’m hoping that if the test is successful, then we’ll get some of the big aerospace companies really wanting to invest and incorporate this Illinois technology,” Allison said.

James Allison is an Illinois Grainger Engineering Associate Professor of industrial and enterprise systems engineering in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and is affiliated with the Department of Aerospace Engineering.