Abstract
During the last decade, the world faced the mass insertion of small satellites in the space technology scenario. Every year, the number of micro and nanosatellites launched increases and gets more attention from players in the space market. Despite the lack of a national launcher, the Brazilian Space Program is known for some successful development in the last century, including its space assets, such as a privileged launch site near the equator, a family of flight proven and reliable sounding rockets for suborbital flights and microgravity experiments and universities with established small satellites programs. Thereby, the present work proposes a modification of the Brazilian VSB-30 sounding rocket in order to allow the launch and insertion in low Earth orbit (LEO) of small satellites fulfilling the gap of a national launcher. It also presents a CubeSat orbital decay simulation and orbital insertion simulation with the modified rocket launched from the Alcântara Launch Center as a matter of verifying the potential of national missions using this modified launcher.
Highlights
During the last decade, the world faced the mass insertion of small satellites in the space technology scenario
It is worth noting that those times were chosen with a small optimization procedure, the general idea is that, for a circular orbit, the flight path angle φ need to be close to zero, the rocket was launched with just the first two stages with the times shown in Table 4 and the time where φ cross the zero was observed
Both modified VSB-30s proposals were successful in reaching the necessary altitude and velocity to insert a satellite into orbit, changing its original profile from suborbital launcher to orbital launcher
Summary
The world faced the mass insertion of small satellites in the space technology scenario. In accordance with the presented trend, this work proposes the feasibility analysis of launching a CubeSat from a modification of the Brazilian sounding rocket VSB-30. Within the scope of this work is the suggestion of modifications to this vehicle turning its service module in a third stage, in order to allow the launch and insertion in LEO of small satellites.
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