ISS Commercial Reboost (2008)

Skycorp was awarded a contract by an unnamed American aerospace company to develop a design and a plan for the commercial reboost of the International Space Station (ISS).  The ISSRS would be used as a means to reduce the upmass requirements for ISS reboost by using a solar electric propulsion system instead of chemical propulsion.  The ISSRS would have required about 250 kg of Xenon per year, resulting in a 90% decrease in the upmass otherwise required.  The total delta v provided would have been almost 500 meters/sec over the life of the station.  At a cost of over $3000/kg otherwise for chemical fuel, this system would have rapidly paid for itself.  The aerospace company declined to move forward and was sold a few years later.

DARPA/Time Domain/Skycorp Time Domain Relative Navigation System (TDRNS) (2008-2011)

Skycorp incorporated, subcontracting to the Time Domain Corporation of Huntsville Alabama was awarded a DARPA Phase I and later a Phase II SBIR for the development of a relative navigation system that would allow a fractionated or clustered spacecraft to know their relative positions to high precision.  Skycorp’s role was for the application of the TDRNS sensor to the question of clustered spacecraft operation and developing mission scenarios for the use of the sensor for DARPA.  This included the DARPA F6 program, which was a program for flying spacecraft that distributed tasks amongst the different spacecraft in a cluster, rather than in a large spacecraft.  There are advantages to this architecture in that smaller more easily manufacturable and lower cost spacecraft can be used to, when aggregated, reproduce the capabilities of a larger system.

Skycorp wrote the requirements for a flight mission, developed the test regime for the ground test articles, and worked with the engineering team at the NASA MSFC flat floor facility (shown below) to validate and verify specifications and requirements for the hardware.
The applications of this technology go well beyond that of precision navigation for clustered spacecraft.  Precision cooperative operation of swarms of robots in industrial environments, planetary surface systems operations, and anywhere that precision relative position information is required.

National Snow and Ice Data Center, Nimbus II HRIR Data Reprocessing

Skycorp was awarded a contract by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) to reprocess the data from the Nimbus II (Circa 1966) High Resolution Infrared Radiometer (HRIR).  This data had not seen the light of day since the 1960’s and had been recovered by the NSIDC and NASA GSFC from tapes stored at the National Archives.  Our task was to reprocess this data and display it in a manner that would allow NSIDC scientists to be able to determine the usefulness of the HRIR data for finding the edges of the ice pack in the Arctic and Antarctic in the 1960’s.  Skycorp engineers took the data and reprocessed it into Google Earth KML format and displayed it as an overlay in Google Earth.  The image on the left below clearly shows the edge of the Antarctic ice pack and the difference in temperature between the ice and the colder Antarctic continent.  The image on the right is a global mosaic of the HRIR data for a single day (August 23, 1966) that is contemporaneous with our Lunar Orbiter Earthrise image.  The differences in temperature (these are temperature measurements and not images) between the oceans and the Australian continent are clearly visible in the image as are the Monsoons over India at the far left of the globe (bluer colors are colder temps).  
The project was a complete success and we were awarded a follow on contract to further reprocess the data into a modern NetCDF-4 format that is current with the scientific community.  This project conclusively showed the relevance of otherwise forgotten data from the 1960’s and what could be accomplished by using modern computer methods and display software in climate change and Earth observation studies.