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Vision for Microtechnology Space Missions 25

. Microheat-sinks for microsat thermal control applications
. Tunable Fabry–Perot etalon optical filters for remote sensing applications 5
. Two-axis fine-pointing micromirrors for intersatellite optical communica-
tions applications. 16

2.3 POTENTIAL SPACE APPLICATIONS FOR MEMS TECHNOLOGY
It should be apparent that the near-term benefit of MEMS technology is that
it allows developers to rescale existing macrosystems down to the microsystem
level. However, beyond simply shrinking today’s devices, the true beauty of
MEMS technology derives from the system redefinition freedom it provides to
designers, leading to the invention of entirely new classes of highly integrated
microsystems.
It is envisioned that MEMS technology will serve as both an ‘‘enhancing’’ and
an ‘‘enabling’’ technology for many future science and exploration missions. En-
abling technologies are those that provide the presently unavailable capabilities
necessary for a mission’s implementation and are vital to both intermediate and
long-term missions. Enhancing technologies typically provide significant mission
performance improvements, mitigations of critical mission risks, and significant
increases in mission critical resources (e.g., cost, power, and mass).
MEMS technology should have a profound and far-reaching impact on many of
NASA’s future space platforms. Satellites in low-Earth orbit, deep-space interplan-
etary probes, planetary rovers, advanced space telescopes, lunar orbiters, and lunar
landers could all likely benefit in some way from the infusion of versatile MEMS
technology. Many see the future potential for highly integrated spacecraft architec-
tures where boundaries between traditional, individual bus and payload subsystems
are at a minimum blurred, or in some extreme applications, nonexistent with the
infusion of multifunctional MEMS-based microsystems.
NASA’s GSFC has pursued several efforts not only to increase the general
awareness of MEMS within the space community but also to spur along specific
mission-unique infusions of MEMS technology where appropriate. Over the past
several years the space mission architects at the GSFC’s Integrated Mission Design
Center (IMDC), where collaborative end-to-end mission conceptual design studies
are performed, have evaluated the feasibility of using MEMS technology in a
number of mission applications. As part of this MEMS technology ‘‘push’’ effort,
many MEMS-based devices emerging from research laboratories have been added
to the IMDC’s component database used by the mission conceptual design team.
The IMDC is also a rich source of future mission requirements and constraints data
that can be used to derive functional and performance specifications to guide
MEMS technology developments. Careful analysis of these data will help to
identify those missions where infusing a specific MEMS technology will have a
significant impact, or conversely, identifying where an investment in a broadly app-
licable ‘‘crosscutting’’ MEMS technology will yield benefits to multiple missions.
The remainder of this section covers some high-priority space mission applica-
tion areas where MEMS technology infusion would appear to be beneficial.

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC