Author: Michael Paluszek
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DOE Awards Princeton Fusion Systems Three INFUSE 2022a Grants
The Department of Energy announced the First Round of the FY 2022 Public-Private Partnership Awards to Advance Fusion Energy. The awards list contains 18 awardees. Princeton Fusion Systems, a doing-business-as name for Princeton Satellite Systems, received three awards: Electron density profiles on PFRC with USPR: Ultrashort Pulse Reflectometry (USPR) is a plasma diagnostic technique that…
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Ford Mach-E
Princeton Satellite Systems has been marketing SunStation electric vehicle charging stations for some time. We are also EV enthusiasts. One employee owns a Tesla Model 3. I now own a Ford Mach-E. It replaces a Nissan Leaf that was purchased in 2012. Before we purchased the Mach-E we looked at the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the…
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Hohmann Transfer Simulation with the Spacecraft Control Toolbox
Hohmann transfers are a well-known maneuver used to change the semi-major axis of an orbit. The Spacecraft Control Toolbox allows you to compute the required velocity changes, and integrate them into a full simulation. In this demonstration, we create a 6U CubeSat that has 3 orthogonal reaction wheels and a single hydrazine thruster. The thruster…
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Nuclear Space Propulsion Zoom Talk for the Foundation for the Future
Michael Paluszek of Princeton Satellite Systems, will talk about nuclear propulsion for space at the Foundation for the Future Zoom meeting on Thursday, May 19 at noon EDT. The talk will discuss space propulsion and how fusion and fission power will revolutionize space exploration. The Foundation for the Fusion has many other excellent speakers on…
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ARPA-E 2022 Fusion Annual Meeting
I attended the ARPA-E 2022 Fusion Annual Meeting at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. Here is the poster for our Princeton Field Reversed Configuration ARPA-E OPEN 2018 grant. Here is our ARPA-E GAMOW poster on power electronics. It includes work by Princeton Fusion Systems, Princeton University, Qorvo and the National Renewable Energy…
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A Third Planet Discovered Orbiting Proxima Centauri
Introduction A third planet, as large as 26% of the mass of Earth, has been discovered orbiting our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri .Astronomer João Faria and his collaborators detected Proxima Centauri d using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations. It would be exciting to send a spacecraft to enter the…
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Moonfall – The Movie
Moonfall is a movie coming out in 2022. It creates a scenario where the Moon’s orbit is changed and set on a collision course with the Earth. It is fun to work out the orbital mechanics. Let us assume that the Moon is in a circular orbit around the Earth. It is actually more influenced…
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PSS Toolboxes 2021.1 Now Available!
Version 2021.1 of Princeton Satellite Systems toolboxes for MATLAB is now available! Over 50 new functions and scripts are included. Many other existing functions have been improved. One new function is AtmNRLMSISE.m, an atmosphere function based on the NRL MSISE model. It is uses extensive flight data and includes sun effects. It computes the overall…
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Nuclear Fusion Power and Propulsion in the News
We just started our latest project for ARPA-E under the ARPA-E GAMOW program in which we will be build power amplifiers for fusion reactors. The goal is to lower the cost and increase the reliability of fusion reactor power electronics. We currently have grants under the DOE INFUSE program and another ARPA-E project that is…
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The Optical Navigation Module for the Spacecraft Control Toolbox is Now Available
Space optical navigation employs a camera for attitude determination and a second high dynamic range camera on a pan/track mount for terrain and celestial body tracking. Navigation and attitude determination are performed in a Bayesian framework using anUnscented Kalman Filter with an IMU as the navigation and attitude base. The Optical Navigation Module provides MATLAB…