MMA™️ announced that it is relocating to a new state-of-the-art facility at Baseline in Broomfield, Colorado.
The new facility doubles MMA’s current square footage, enabling planned enhancements of MMA’s key capabilities through the addition of more environmental testing equipment, increased capacity in the machine shop, robust composites manufacturing, ample manufacturing space for high-volume production, and an expanded R+D lab for more additive manufacturing. MMA will begin moving in at the end of this year with a plan to start operations at the new Baseline facility starting January 1, 2025.
Download our press release for more information.
T-minus 3 days until we get to see everyone again at the 39th Space Symposium at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs! Exhibiting at Space Symposium is a highlight of our year, and we always look forward to attending this premier space industry event.
We are very excited to be launching our next-generation dragNET De-orbit and Solar Sail System this year! Our flight heritage deorbit was effective in deorbiting spacecraft in just over 2 years, but this newly retooled dragNET is going to make Space Sustainability accessible to all missions with <50% fewer parts and 1/2 the cost of the original. Come by Booth 628 to see it in person and talk to the team to learn how you can simply, affordably and reliably ensure your mission complies with the FCC <5 year rule for deorbiting spacecraft, launch vehicles or other space assets in LEO.
At 6 meters tall with a 7 meter aperture, MMA’s Meta Lens antenna in development for NASA’s Global L-band Active/Passive Observatory for Water Cycle Studies (GLOWS) mission is more than double the size of any other membrane deployable antenna MMA has flown to date. Additionally, once deployed, the entire antenna system spins on orbit at a rate of approximately 15 rpm.
What is the dynamic response of such a large, spinning structure? Answering this question is essential to assuring mission success. Given the complexity and scale of this system, and objective of keeping cost to a minimum, ground-testing including full scale spin testing is not feasible. Instead, MMA Design is predicting the response of this system using advanced finite element analysis (FEA).
Modeling this system is non-trivial for multiple reasons. The thin-film membrane layers comprising the Meta Lens are inherently structurally unstable. The high-strain composite booms that support the lens are thin shell structures that must be carefully designed to be strong enough to adequately tension the lens. And finally, MMA Design’s connections between the tips of these booms and membrane layers require specialized elements capturing the unique kinematics of these features. Thus, MMA Design has advanced our FEA capabilities in order to model these very complex, large deployable systems for determining stiffness and 1st mode frequency.
For validating our GLOWS system models, MMA Design has built a series of scaled models, including a 1/6 scale prototype that spins, just like the full size antenna system. The response of the spinning scaled-down prototype is measured using our Vicon motion capture system and compared to MMA Design’s modeled response. Initial testing has demonstrated close correlation between these models and our test articles, validating the approach for full scale system modeling.
MMA Design’s experimentally measured thin film membrane out-of-plane displacement response (left) and FEA result (right).
For more information, check out MMA Design’s upcoming paper at AIAA SCITECH covering this effort entitled “Finite Element Model Correlation for Deployable High Strain Fiber Reinforced Composite Boom and Membrane Antenna System”.
1/6 scaled spinning GLOWS system test article and overhead VICON dynamic measurement system.
And learn more about the NASA GLOWS mission here.
