A Family of Full Spacecraft-to-Payload Isolators

Upcoming space payloads require alignment between optical elements on the order of a few nanometers and pointing tolerances of milliarcseconds. Examples from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Origins program are the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Northrop Grumman Space Technology has developed a dual-stage vibration isolation approach that attenuates spacecraft-induced vibrations by three to four orders of magnitude. The second stage is an isolator placed between the spacecraft bus and the optical payload. The isolator consists of a set of passively damped, flexured beams. The isolators employ techniques for embedding viscoelastic damping layers within composite lay-ups that were pioneered and patented by Northrop Grumman Space Technology.