US is about to launch a quantum sensor in space
Astra, a U.S.-based small satellite launcher startup, plans to launch its first mission this week from Spaceport 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. After that, Astra's second mission, QubeSat at the University of California, Berkeley, will launch a 2U CubeSat with a quantum gyroscope.
This gyroscope uses diamond NV color centers. The advantage of this sensor over conventional technology is that it can be made very small while still being accurate, which is ideal for CubeSats and spacecraft in general. This CubeSat will serve as a proof-of-concept experiment to demonstrate the performance of NV color center gyroscope technology in space.
quantum gyroscope
The QubeSat project is funded by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI), which funds launches at universities, high schools and nonprofits, including NASA centers. Of the 32 proposals submitted, the QubeSat proposal ranked in the top 10, and the top 18 projects received launch opportunities.
The advisory team for the QubeSat project comes from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Space Science Laboratory (SSL), and the Budker team and the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley. The collaboration with the Space Science Laboratory (SSL) includes holding technical meetings on the development of the QubeSat with engineers with decades of experience in satellite development, as well as working with SSL to test and manufacture satellites at its facilities.
In addition, the QubeSat team spent more than 200 hours developing control software for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's new Quantum Sensing Lab, which aims to study Earth using the same principles they use for quantum gyroscopes' diamond NV color centers Chemical. This informs the implementation of the QubeSat project and provides a workspace for testing the sensors.
Finally, Dr. Andrey Jarmola, a researcher in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley, one of the original theoretical creators of quantum gyroscopes based on diamond NV color centers, advised QubeSat on the entire process of miniaturizing quantum gyroscopes for aerospace use.
CubeSats provide a perfect platform for cheaply testing new technologies like quantum gyroscopes, the research team says, because the industry won't risk letting the success of a full-scale, multi-million-dollar payload depend on entirely new sensor technology. The results of this project could prompt future launches to further test the technology and qualify it for continued use in space, which could be a major advance in the development of small satellite technology.
Reference link:
[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/01/12/astra-lv0008-pre-launch-testing/
[2] https://stac.berkeley.edu/project/qubesat
