Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Description Of New Inflatable/Rigidizable Hexapod Structure Testbed For Shape And Vibration Control, Olawale Adetona, Lee Keel, Lucas Horta, Dave Cadogan, George Sapna, Steve Scarborough

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

Larger and more powerful space based instruments are needed to meet increasingly sophisticated scientific demand. To support this need, concepts for telescopes with apertures of 100 meters are being investigated, but the required technologies are not in hand today. Due to the capacity limits of launch vehicles, the idea of deploying, erecting, or inflating large structures in space is being considered. Recently, rigidization concepts of large inflatable structures have demonstrated the capability of weight reductions of up to 50% from current concepts with packaging efficiencies near 80%. One of the important aspects of inflatable structures is vibration mitigation and line-of-sight …