We are looking forward to seeing you at the 38th Space Symposium on April 17th through the 20th at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs! Come by Booth 628 at the Northrop Grumman Exhibit Center South Hall to see what’s new at MMA. It’s been a busy year and we are excited to tell you about our new capabilities and technology advancements.
Meet the team who will be attending, including folks from our engineering, manufacturing, people and BD teams. And get yourself a pair of Limited Edition Explorer Socks!
MMA is thrilled and honored to have been awarded an inaugural Northrop Grumman Supplier Excellence Award for Strategic Excellence on March 2, 2023! This distinction was awarded to MMA — one in 60 companies out of over 10,000 NG suppliers! — for performing at the highest level. This new award celebrates our work supporting Northrup Grumman in achieving the highest standards of ethics, integrity and performance when providing products and solutions for their customers. Our President + CEO, Mitch Wiens, along with our VP of Programs, Pietro DiLeonardo, were in Rockville, Maryland to accept the award. We are so grateful to NG for their trust and confidence in our team and for their continued partnership.
Northrop Grumman leadership gather for a special awards conference at the Bethesda North Marriott on March 2, 2023.
Singapore’s DSO National Laboratories has released the first radar imagery from the NeuSAR mission using MMA’s next-gen Deployable High Gain Reflectarray (DaHGR) antenna. The fully polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been successfully providing all-weather imaging starting 8 days after its launch last summer.
Singapore Downtown, 8 Aug 2022 – Full polarimetric Spot image offering enhanced visual details. Photo: DSO National Laboratories
Eastern Singapore, 25 July 2022 – Full polarimetric Strip image demonstrating high quality imaging for both land and maritime applications over a wide area. Photo: DSO National Laboratories
Phuket, Thailand, 16 July 2022 – Single polarimetric image obtained during day-and-night, all-weather with ‘see through cloud’ conditions. Photo: DSO National Laboratories
It’s a big day at MMA! After several years in collaboration with Northrop Grumman and AFRL, we are ready to ship our Deployable Subsystem which is the structural backbone of AFRL’s Arachne flight experiment. This exciting program will convert solar to RF energy, and has a planned launch in 2025.
Arachne Deployable Subsystem during final deployment testing at MMA facility.
Artist’s rendering of the Air Force Laboratory’s Arachne flight experiment on orbit. Credit: Partise
When the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA’s most powerful rocket to date, launched on November 15, 2022, four of MMA Design’s HaWK Solar Arrays await their turn to finally spread their wings to study the Earth, the Moon and beyond! Accompanying the important Artemis I payload of mannequins – in preparation for its ultimate human cargo when the US returns to the moon – 10 cubesats are hitching a ride as secondary payloads. Four of those missions will be powered by MMA HaWK Solar Arrays.
Image credits: NASA
BioSentinel, a collaboration with NASA Ames Research Laboratories, will demonstrate a biosensor to detect, measure, and correlate the impact of space radiation to living organisms over long durations beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). MMA’s BioSentinel HaWKs are a combination of two standard MMA HaWK configurations, one of which is actuated by our Solar Array Drive Assembly (SADA), for a combined 84 W of peak power.
The EQUULEUS mission HaWK configuration includes wings that are gimbaled on a common single axis of rotation using MMA’s SADA which spans the 1U x 2U face of the cubesat. The array provides 56 W of peak power. EQUULEUS, a University of Tokyo/JAXA mission that MMA was honored to work on, will measure the distribution of plasma surrounding the Earth’s plasmasphere to help scientists understand the radiation environment in that region.
In partnership with the team at Arizona State University, MMA delivered enhanced HaWK (eHaWK) Solar Arrays with 112 W of peak power in support of their LunaH-Map mission. Both wings are positioned using MMA’s SADA which spans the 1U width of the spacecraft. This mission, from ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, searches for hydrogen deposits on the Moon’s south pole by creating higher-fidelity maps of near-surface hydrogen in craters and other permanently shadowed regions with neutron spectrometers.
And, working with JPL and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, NEAScout is a robotic reconnaissance mission headed beyond the moon. NEAScout will deploy a solar sail to fly by, and return data from, an asteroid representative of other near-earth asteroids (NEAs) that may one day be human destinations. MMA’s HaWK array will contribute 42 W of peak power for the NEAScout mission.
The greatly anticipated launch of SLS and Artemis I lead the way for future human exploration of the moon and, importantly, flight test four more MMA HaWK Solar Array configurations. MMA’s HaWK Solar Arrays lead the industry in high-performance space power solutions by delivering more watts per kilogram and more kilowatts per cubic meter for CubeSats as well as larger platforms.
Another pair of MMA’s High Watts per Kilogram “HaWK” solar arrays are poised to launch for the moon. Anticipated to launch this November on a SpaceX Falcon9 from Cape Canaveral, Lunar Flashlight will be the first mission to use a four-laser reflectometer to look for water ice on the Moon.
“This is an exciting time for lunar exploration. The launch of Lunar Flashlight, along with the many small satellite missions aboard Artemis I (on which MMA HaWK solar arrays are powering 4 other missions!), may form the foundations for science discoveries as well as support future missions to the Moon’s surface,” said Roger Hunter, Small Spacecraft Technology program manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
On October 7, 2022, another MMA dragNET De-orbit System launched on a RocketLab Electron as part of its only payload — the General Atomics GAzelle Satellite hosting a Radmon and an Argos-4 payload. Argos-4 will become part of the Argos constellation supported by the NOAA Cooperative Data and Rescue Services Program.
De-orbiting space debris recently became a hot topic of discussion again as the FCC unanimously approved a rule that requires satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to be disposed of in no more than 5 years post mission, significantly shortening the decades-old 25-year recommendation set forth by NASA in the 90s.
MMA’s dragNET De-orbit System has proven its effectiveness with the Minotaur I ORS Mission in 2013, which successfully de-orbited the upper stage of that launch vehicle within 2 years, besting the new FCC requirements.
Congratulations to our customer, DSO National Laboratories, and industry partner, Satrec Initiative, on the successful launch and deployment of the NeuSAR satellite. This pathfinder mission includes MMA’s next-generation DaHGR antenna Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) which will enable Singapore’s space operations to capture images day or night, and through heavy cloud cover or other weather conditions typically adverse for imaging.
NeuSAR was launched from India on June 30, 2022 aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)-C53 from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
As we look forward to the year ahead, we would like to wish each of you a very happy and prosperous New Year and thank you for your continued partnership and support.
In spite of all the “distributed teamwork” and zooming, facing the global challenges of the last couple of years has brought us together in unexpected ways. As an organization as well as an industry, we have discovered ways to push the boundaries of our curiosity, resilience and resourcefulness, to transcend those challenges with stellar success! This is a testament to the commitment, dedication and passion of each and every one of you who have contributed along this journey.
Reflecting on the accomplishments of the past year, we are reminded that our commitment to living our core values — where putting PEOPLE FIRST is central to our mission and success — will always be our north star. We are grateful for our team and the excellence they bring to bear in our work, and for our customers who trust in us to do what we do best. We look forward to another year of accomplishingMORE together!
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Artist’s rendering of the Air Force Laboratory’s Arachne flight experiment on orbit. Credit: Partise
