Solar Panels for GLIDE Spacecraft to be Provided by Rocket Lab
Ball Aerospace has selected Rocket Lab to provide solar panels for NASA's GLIDE (Global Lyman-Alpha Imager of Dynamic Exosphere) spacecraft. GLIDE is a heliophysics mission intended to study variability in Earth’s atmosphere slated for launch in 2025.
“Rocket Lab has become the ‘go-to’ provider of space solar power and space systems products throughout the space industry, including for ambitious heliophysics missions like GLIDE.”
Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck.
The exosphere plays an important role in Earth’s response to space weather, the changing conditions in space driven by the Sun. That weather can impact our technology, from satellites in orbit to communications signals in the upper atmosphere or power lines on the ground. During space weather storms, the exosphere experiences huge spikes of energy and mediates Earth’s recovery from these disturbances. GLIDE will help us better understand the fundamental physics of our atmosphere and improve our ability to predict the impacts of the Sun’s activity.
The solar panels will utilize SolAero by Rocket Lab’s high-efficiency, radiation-hardened, quadruple-junction Z4J solar cells, laid down on carbon composite facesheet panels manufactured at the company’s facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The GLIDE spacecraft will launch with another Rocket Lab-powered spacecraft, also built by Ball Aerospace, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). SWFO-L1 is a heliophysics mission that will collect solar wind data and coronal imagery to meet NOAA’s operational requirements to monitor and forecast solar storm activity.
“Rocket Lab has become the ‘go-to’ provider of space solar power and space systems products throughout the space industry, including for ambitious heliophysics missions like GLIDE,” said Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck. “I am grateful to our partners at Ball Aerospace for selecting Rocket Lab and excited to be working with them to support NASA’s Heliophysics missions to deliver advanced science.”
Rocket Lab has provided power to multiple spacecraft as part of NASA’s Heliophysics Division missions including the Parker Solar Probe, the first-ever mission to “touch” the Sun that launched in 2018, and the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a robotic space mission to study Earth’s magnetosphere that launched in 2015.
(Source: Rocket Lab news release and NASA. Image created by Lara Waldrop, University of Illinois, The Grainger College of Engineering Electrical & Computer Engineering)