Blue Canyon Tech

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June 24, 2015 BETHESDA, MD and BOULDER, CO —Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) has been selected by PlanetiQ to build the world’s first commercial satellite constellation dedicated to weather, climate and space weather. The first satellites will be launched in late 2016 and continue into the first half of 2017.

Blue Canyon Technologies was selected by PlanetiQ based on its development track record and its cutting-edge, low-cost design approach that has delivered hundreds of components and systems for numerous space missions. In April, BCT was awarded a contract to build the Radiometer Assessment using Vertically Aligned Nanotubes (RAVAN) small satellite for the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

“Weather is the next commercial space frontier, as demand grows not only for better forecasts of day-to-day weather, severe storms and hurricanes, but also for weather and climate data solutions that enhance weather readiness, support risk management and increase business intelligence,” said Anne Hale Miglarese, President and CEO of PlanetiQ. “Together, PlanetiQ and BCT bring the innovation, technical expertise and experience to cost-effectively product the high-quality data needed to transform the weather satellite industry and deliver unprecedented economic value.”

BCT plans to build an initial set of 12 microsatellites. Each satellite will carry a Global Positioning System radio occultation payload. PlanetiQ and BCT are already working side-by-side on the project, with PlanetiQ having co-located its aerospace engineering team at BCT’s facilities in Boulder. This allows the satellites and sensors to be manufactured and integrated in the same location. Together, BCT and PlanetiQ have already dramatically reduced the satellite size and weight without sacrificing any instrument capabilities.

“We are certainly pleased to be chosen by PlanetiQ. Weather is emerging as a major growth sector for aerospace, and our partnership with PlanetiQ positions BCT and the state of Colorado to play a leading role,” said George Stafford, President and CEO of BCT. “Our systems and components match well with PlanetiQ’s instrument requirements and we are glad to be working on this spacecraft and mission.

PlanetiQ recently announced the successful testing of its first “Pyxis” weather sensor and is setting up for production with BCT. Pyxis collects dense, precise measurements of global temperature, pressure and water vapor using a technique called GPS Radio Occultation (GPS-RO). This is similar to data collected by weather balloons but on more of a global scale. Among the satellite data sources currently ingested into computer weather models, GPS-RO has shown to be the most cost-effective and has the highest impact per observation on forecast accuracy. As of today, only a sparse amount of GPS-RO data exists.

Pyxis is the only GPS-RO sensor in a small package that is powerful enough to provide more than 10 times the amount of data available from GPS-RO sensors currently on orbit, and to routinely probe down into the lowest layers of the atmosphere where severe weather occurs.

“The small size and weight of the Pyxis sensor – combined with BCT’s high-performance mission experience – will allow us to quickly field a constellation to provide the highest quality, most cost-effective weather data ever available,” said PlanetiQ Founder Chris McCormick, who leads PlanetiQ’s instrument team and developed the sensors for the only GPS-RO constellation that has provided operational weather forecast data. “With 12 satellites providing 8 million data points per day, GPS-RO will easily become the most important contributor to weather forecast accuracy at a fraction of the cost of traditional weather satellites.”

About Blue Canyon Technologies
Blue Canyon Technologies, LLC (BCT) is a privately held business founded in 2008 to bring high-performance, affordable solutions to space missions. The company is an innovative, experienced integrator of aerospace systems and developer of advanced aerospace products and technologies. BCT has designed, developed, tested and delivered systems and components for dozens of space mission, with over 30 systems to be launched within the next 18 months for the US Department of Defense, NASA and commercial customers. BCT is based in Boulder, Colorado.

About PlanetiQ
PlanetiQ has commenced development of its initial satellites for the first commercial constellation dedicated to weather, climate and space weather, and is now raising additional capital to fund the build and launch of the constellation through completion. PlanetiQ data and services are valuable to a diverse range of government and commercial customers worldwide in areas including weather forecasting, aviation, shipping, offshore operations, defense, intelligence, energy, agriculture and insurance. PlanetiQ is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.

In an era of budget cuts, the aerospace industry has experienced growing pressure to develop systems that are low-cost. CubeSats, with their small size and modest resource requirements, fit this bill. Boulder-based Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) aims at making small satellites viable tools of science by increasing their reliability and performance.

BCT’s focus on CubeSat subsystems grew from an industry demand for smaller satellites. As George Stafford, CEO and President of BCT, explains:

“We originally were not a CubeSat company; our first customer, the Air Force, said they wanted smaller satellites. In 2009, the Air Force put out an SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) request to develop an attitude determination control system for a CubeSat. We bid on the SBIR and won it – that provided the impetus for us to push into the industry.”

Since then, BCT has evolved into a pioneering force within the CubeSat industry, developing subsystems, such as the first compact star tracker, that increase small satellite functionality and reliability. Stafford explains:

“Our goal is to improve the performance of CubeSat subsystems so that they are better than larger heritage systems. This opens up CubeSats to do almost anything that larger spacecraft can do.”

More than just conceivably matching the functionality of larger satellites, CubeSats could open the doors for unique applications. For example, CubeSats can be launched in constellations that allow for low-cost, global atmospheric measurements.

Located less than fifteen minutes from the CU-Boulder campus, BCT has close ties to the CU aerospace community. Shortly upon their founding, BCT brought on Dr. Scott Palo, CU AES Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research, as a consultant. Stafford notes that Dr. Palo’s “strong background in mission design and radio frequencies” has made him a “key member” of the BCT team.

BCT also looks to CU-Boulder to provide fresh employee talent:

“We hire interns from CU that often turn into full-time employees. We’ve found it beneficial to mix engineers from industry with recent college graduates. Newer people bouncing ideas off of experienced people, [and visa versa], promotes a good mix of heritage design and innovativeness.”

In addition to CU-Boulder, BCT has ingratiated itself into the broader Boulder, and national, aerospace community. On the local front, BCT has worked closely with Raytheon and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) (their attitude determination control system will fly aboard LASP’s CubeSat MinXSS later this year). Nationally, BCT has close ties to JPL and NASA, supplying systems for the first interplanetary CubeSat missions, MarCO and INSPIRE

Stafford explains the value he sees in operating out of Boulder:

“Boulder is a great location for component resources and personnel. There are a lot of companies that do machine work and electronic board manufacturing in the area, and many talented people to draw on from the university, Ball Aerospace, Sierra Nevada [and elsewhere].”

Though larger companies and institutions frequently dominate the aerospace industry, Stafford highlights the benefit of being a small business:

“We have the ability to turn on a dime. When we see opportunities, we can act on them pretty quickly. We do have limited resources, but luckily, in the CubeSat world, limited resources go a long way.”

-Written By: Ari Sandberg, Intern

BOULDER, Colorado – June 12, 2015 – Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) has been awarded a contract to provide the attitude control system for each of the two Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats that are being built by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The MarCO technology demonstration (the first-ever interplanetary CubeSats) will act as real-time data relays for the InSight lander as it descends through the Martian atmosphere.

Enabling the precision pointing required by the MarCO communication payload is BCT’s XACT (fleXible Attitude Control Technology) module, which utilizes a nano-star tracker, precision reaction wheels, and all associated electronics and software to provide the highest-performance CubeSat attitude determination and control system available.

Already designed to support virtually any low-earth-orbit mission, the XACT software has been augmented for MarCO to support deep-space navigation, including thruster control algorithms for momentum control and precision trajectory corrections throughout the journey to Mars.

XACT is flexible in that it supports not only CubeSats, but also much larger spacecraft as well, by using larger external actuators, also developed by BCT, resulting in substantial savings in cost and schedule over traditional spacecraft attitude control systems.

Blue Canyon Technologies, LLC is a privately held small business specializing in micro-sized spacecraft systems and components designed for large satellite constellations. BCT is uniquely focused on developing small spacecraft systems designed for high-volume manufacturing. We create high-performance, low-cost systems that leverage design manufacturing techniques from across the spectrum of aerospace and non-aerospace markets. These systems include satellites and components for classes of spacecraft including small, micro, nano, and CubeSat sizes. We specialize in precision pointing platforms based upon our high-performance Attitude Determination and Control components, integrated systems, and our CubeSat bus.

For more information on the MarCO mission, please visit:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4622

BOULDER, Colorado – April 13, 2015 – Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) has been awarded a contract to build, test, and operate a new high-performance nano-satellite. BCT will be building this spacecraft for the Radiometer Assessment using Vertically Aligned Nanotubes (RAVAN) project, which is led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), with partners L-1 Standards and Technology, Inc. and Draper Laboratory, and funded by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office.

BCT will integrate the RAVAN payload with the XB1 Spacecraft Bus and perform environmental testing of the complete spacecraft. BCT will also provide launch integration services and operate the spacecraft from its new Mission Operations Center. BCT’s spacecraft, the XB1, is a high-performance CubeSat that includes an ultra-precise attitude control system that allows for accurate knowledge and fine-pointing of the satellite payload.

“BCT has created a low–cost, Complete Small Spacecraft Solution that allows customers like APL to focus its resources on the mission science”, said George Stafford, BCT president.

The objective of the RAVAN project is to demonstrate a radiometer that is compact, low-cost, and low-uncertainty. The radiometer uses a gallium fixed-point black body as a built-in calibration source and a vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) absorber. VACNTs are the blackest known substance. Neither the VACNT nor gallium black body has ever been used in an orbiting scientific instrument. Successful demonstration will pave the way for a constellation Earth radiation budget mission that can provide valuable measurements needed to significantly advance our understanding of ongoing and future climate change. The RAVAN mission is expected to launch in mid-2016.

The BCT XB1 spacecraft will be developed and operated at BCT’s new 18,000 square foot facility located in Boulder, CO. BCT’s new office and lab space is designed specifically for high volume production of spacecraft systems and components, with the manufacturing capability to handle large constellations of small spacecraft.

About Blue Canyon Technologies
Blue Canyon Technologies, LLC is a privately-held business founded in 2008 to bring high-performance, affordable solutions to space missions. The company is an innovative, experienced integrator of aerospace systems and developer of advanced aerospace products and technologies. For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.comBCT Press Release for BCT RAVAN Spacecraft.

Under an Air Force SBIR contract, Blue Canyon Technologies’ objective was to design, develop, and fabricate an all-in-one, packaged ADCS prototype unit to provide pointing accuracy of ± 0.2° or better…within a 10cm x 10cm x 5cm cube. The resulting XACT attitude control system and the products based upon the XACT technology have enabled a number of new missions for a wide range of organizations, including the Air Force, JPL, NASA Johnson, Southwest Research Institute, and Raytheon to name a few.

This Air Force SBIR award has led directly to the development of a line of products for BCT creating a demand in the small satellite spacecraft market. The XACT system sensors include: a Star Tracker, inertial measurement unit, sun sensor, magnetometer, and an optional GPS unit. Actuators include 3 Reaction Wheels, and 3 Torque Rods.

BOULDER, Colo. – Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) has been awarded a contract to participate in the first CubeSat Mission to leave Earth’s orbit for interplanetary space. Being developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mission will use Blue Canyon Technologies Thin Slice Star Trackers on dual 3U CubeSats (1U CubeSats are 10cm on each side). The mission called INSPIRE (Interplanetary NanoSpacecraft Pathfinder In Relevant Environment), will demonstrate functionality, communication, navigation, and payload-hosting in deep space. BCT developed its high performance, micro-sized Star Trackers specifically for use on missions like INSPIRE that use small spacecraft to perform missions traditionally accomplished with larger, more expensive systems. The BCT micro-Star Trackers offer a unique combination of performance and reliability in a miniaturized package, perfect for CubeSat-sized spacecraft.

The INSPIRE project is expected to launch in 2014. (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The BCT Star Trackers will be developed and built at the BCT facilities in Boulder, CO.

Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) has been invited to present at the 9th Annual CubeSat Summer Workshop. BCT will be presenting the new XB1 CubeSat Bus: An Integrated Precision Platform Enabling a New Realm of CubeSat Science. The XB1 leverages the high performance pointing ability of XACT into a complete bus solution. For more information about the CubeSat Workshop visit http://www.cubesat.org/.

Air Force SBIR Transition Story

Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) is pleased to announce a contract award from the United States Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory (USAF/AFRL) to perform research and development of space-based flywheel energy storage. The specific efforts are focused on advanced integrated power and attitude control for the next generation of high-performance spacecraft serving our country’s military and commercial space missions.

“This project truly represents a unique opportunity to redefine the traditional approaches to energy storage and spacecraft attitude control. The technology developed by this project holds great promise to solve complex mission challenges and enable previously impossible missions” said George Stafford, President of Blue Canyon Technologies. “We are privileged to have been selected by AFRL, and look forward to bringing flywheel energy storage to the space industry.”

These efforts will be carried out at the BCT facilities in Boulder, CO.