Force Limited Vibration Testing Applied to the MOST Spacecraft

Abstract

The MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) satellite is Canada's first space telescope. This low-cost Canadian microsatellite was put into orbit from northern Russia aboard a Rockot launch vehicle on 30 June 2003. During the subsequent commissioning phase of the spacecraft, it was shown that not only did the equipment survive launch, it is performing on-orbit better than specified. Prior to the successful launch, a spacecraft and telescope vibration test program was conducted over the period of November 2002 to March 2003. A priority of the test program was to reduce overtesting of the flight hardware that is inherent in conventional vibration testing. For the MOST spacecraft, reduction of overtesting was successfully achieved using a recently developed approach called Force Limited Vibration (FLV). In fact, this was the first time that FLV testing was applied in Canada at the spacecraft level. The paper first presents an overview of the MOST spacecraft followed by a summary of the vibration ...