Author: Charles Swanson
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PSS Advances in Superconducting Motors for Aircraft
PSS just finished up a research contract for NASA in which we discovered some surprising and useful ways in which Low Temperature Superconductors (LTS) may be more suitable than High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) for making light, efficient electric motors. In short, they’re cheaper. They’re much, much easier to design, manufacture, and use. Unlike HTS, it’s…
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PSS Awarded Two NASA SBIRs!
We are pleased to share that PSS has been selected for two NASA Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) awards. The SBIR program enables small business to engage in research or research and development funded by the federal government. The purpose of a SBIR award is to move toward commercialization of a product. It’s a great…
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Spacecraft Control Toolbox To The Moon
Today, I will discuss two functions in release 2020.1 of the Spacecraft Control Toolbox (SCT) which can be used to get your spacecraft into a lunar orbit. They are LunarTargeting.m and LunarMissionControl.m. They are demonstrated together in the script LunarMission.m. LunarTargeting.m produces a transfer orbit that starts at a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) altitude and…
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Three-Burn Solutions for Very Large Inclination Change
This is the second of two blog posts which introduce functionality from the Orbit Transfer Module of the Spacecraft Control Toolbox (SCT). The Orbit Transfer Module has lots of tools to allow you to numerically optimize the engine burns that a spacecraft needs to apply to go from some initial orbit to its target orbit,…
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Hohmann Transfer, but Faster: Optimizing for fuel and elapsed time
In this blog post, we are going to introduce you to functionality found in the Orbit Transfer Module of our Spacecraft Control Toolbox. The Orbit Transfer Module has lots of tools to allow you to numerically optimize the engine burns that a spacecraft needs to apply to go from some initial orbit to its target…
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Fun with Wavelet Analysis
Not all the new functions in 2020.1 are specific to spacecraft. We have also been hard at work adding new functionality to the core toolbox. Here, I’d like to give an example of one of our new functions for performing a Wavelet analysis. But what is a Wavelet analysis? Well, you plot the Wavelet transform…
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The PFRC on Fusion Shark Tank
The PFRC made an appearance on Dr. Matthew Moynihan’s monthly investor pitch event, the Fusion Shark Tank! This event is a conference call on the first Wednesday of every month in which fusion startups pitch their businesses in a Shark-Tank-like format. It’s good practice, and forces us to think carefully about the business case of…
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NASA SBIR Phase III: Low Energy Mission Planning
Hello PSS fans! This is Charles Swanson, recently minted doctor of plasma physics and PSS’s newest employee. It’s my distinct pleasure to discuss our most recent NASA contract: A Phase III SBIR to integrate our Low Energy Mission Planning Toolbox (LEMPT) into NASA’s open source Orbit Determination Toolbox (ODTBX). Have you read about the kinds…