[AR] Re: Recommendations on capacitors in vacuum
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2021 22:29:51 -0400 (EDT)
On Sat, 3 Jul 2021, Eric Sims wrote:
NASA also has a similar EEE spec document, INST-EEE-002. That document can
be a good place to start, but perhaps overkill if you don't have a
particularly long operational life.
It's overkill even if you want a long operational life. The MOST
astronomy satellite -- built almost entirely out of parts ordered from
Digi-Key -- finally died in its 16th year in a high polar LEO (where it
got considerable radiation). It outlived both of its much-more-expensive
more-or-less-successors, Corot and Kepler, built from space-rated parts by
more traditional processes.
Do remember that a NASA document from 2003 (like that EEE spec) is going
to be very much the dinospace take on everything, forty years of
accumulated superstition about how best to make things work. ("We tried
[long list of precautions and procedures] and it worked, so everything on
that list is mandatory from now on.") That was the era when you could
point out to NASA people that forty or fifty satellite-years of experience
with lower-cost satellites showed that their precautions were excessive,
and they would solemnly assure you -- in front of multiple witnesses --
that all those low-cost projects had just gotten lucky.
Nowadays, with the successful low-cost experience mounting into the
hundreds of satellite-years, the message is starting to be taken more
seriously.
(Which is not to say that all low-cost satellites are done well, but it
*is* possible to combine the two attributes.)
Such documents are potentially still useful, but need to be read with a
very skeptical eye.
Henry
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