Activities of Laboratory of Spacecraft Environment Interaction Engineering in Kyushu Institute of Technology

Abstract

Space systems such as satellites, interplanetary probes or space stations, must overcome the space which has extremely severe environment consisting of space plasma, hyper-velocity particles, radiation, ultraviolet ray, atomic oxygen, vacuum, thermal cycles and so on. Even if a component has some troubles, it is usually impossible to repair it in space. Therefore, we often require performing the ground tests on the spacecrafts before its launch. It is an essential technology for exploring the final frontier to make spacecrafts work well on such severe condition. In December 2004, Kyushu Institute of Technology established a research center named as LaSEINE (Laboratory of Spacecraft Environment Interaction Engineering). In this research center, we carry out research and development of space environment technologies which is necessary to achieve the next-generation large-scale space utilization such as high-speed broadband communication, high-precision positioning, remote sensing, material creation, sight-seeing, exploration, energy generation. In this paper, we present activities performed in LaSEINE as for spacecraft charging and discharging