The Deep Space 1 Mission: Flight Validation of New Technology

On September 22 2001 NASA’s Deep Space 1 (DS1) spacecraft passed 2171 km from the nucleus of comet 19P/Borrelly. DS1, the first mission in NASA’s New Millennium Program (NMP), was also the first mission to use solar electric propulsion (SEP) as primary propulsion. In addition, it was NASA’s first spacecraft with both an imaging system and a plasma mass spectrometer to encounter a comet The primary focus of the NMP is to identify and flight validate new, advanced technologies that hold great promise for revolutionizing observations from earth orbit or in deep space. Such technologies, despite being technically mature, have not been demonstrated in space and hence are perceived to present a fairly high risk to missions that propose to use them for the first time. In order to help reduce the costs and risks to future missions that use these technologies, NMP oversees a series of dedicated “technology validation” missions into deep space and around Earth to validate these technologies and prove that they perform as intended in space. Since DS1 there have been four completed follow-on NMP validation activities (DS2, Earth Observing I, Space Technology 5 (ST5), and ST 6 Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment) and four more are under development (ST 6 Inertial Stellar Compass, ST7 Disturbance Reduction System, ST8 and five concepts in Phase A for ST9). NMP projects can be either stand alone missions or payloads on other earth orbiting or deep space missions. The DS1 payload contained a set of technologies that were successfully validated in the first phase of the mission. The principal, or project defining technology validated on DS1 was SEP. The SEP primary propulsion system on DS1 ionized xenon gas in a thrust