Mary Knapp

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

The Solar Observing Low-frequency Array for Radio Astronomy (SOLARA) and accompanying Separated Antennas Reconfigurable Array (SARA) communications system is a medium to long-term project being developed at MIT and JPL. SOLARA is a space-based sparse aperture radio telescope capable of aperture synthesis imaging in the spectral region between 100 k...

Propulsion technology has been identified as a key development area for increasingly capable CubeSats. This paper describes a demonstration mission for electrospray microthrusters developed in MIT's Space Propulsion Lab. The key feature of this system is that it can perform both attitude control and orbit maneuvers with the same se of thrusters, si...

CubeSats and small satellites have potential to provide means to explore space and to perform science in a more affordable way. As the goals for these spacecraft become more ambitious in space exploration, moving from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) or further, the communication systems currently implemented will not be abl...

CubeSats and small satellites are becoming a way to explore space and to perform science more affordably. As the goals for these spacecraft become more ambitious in terms of physical distance (moving from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) or further), and of the amount of data to relay back to Earth (from Kbits to Mbits), the...

An optical moon baffle for stray light attenuation was developed for use on ExoplanetSat, a 3U CubeSat being developed jointly by MIT and Draper Laboratory which aims to detect transiting exoplanets via precision photometry. This paper will discuss the optical and mechanical design of the baffle, as well as the optical performance as demonstrated t...

ExoplanetSat combines the low cost CubeSat platform with an innovative two-stage attitude control system to detect exoplanets. ExoplanetSat will be capable of detecting transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of the brightest sun-like stars with a detection threshold of 7sigma. After the successful flight of the first ExoplanetSat prot...

ExoplanetSat combines the low cost CubeSat platform with an innovative two-stage attitude control system to detect exoplanets. ExoplanetSat will be capable of detecting transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of the brightest sun-like stars with a detection threshold of 7 sigma. The choice of targeting the brightest sun-like stars is m...

Nanosatellites, i.e. spacecraft that weigh between 1 and 10 kg, are drawing increasing interest as platforms for conducting on-orbit science. This trend is primarily driven by the ability to piggyback nanosatellites on the launch of large spacecraft and hence achieve orbit at greatly reduced cost. The CubeSat platform is a standardized nanosatellit...