Rock West sandwich panels support high-power Astro Digital satellites

Rock West Composites (RWC, San Diego, Calif., U.S.) announces the delivery of panels for Astro Digital’s (Santa Clara) 500-watt arrays to support higher power versions of its Corvus buses. RWC teamed with Astro Digital to fabricate solar array substrate (SAS) panels with a distinctive integrated design to save volume and weight. These panels are being integrated into space vehicles, the first of which is scheduled to launch in October.

RWC built the SAS sandwich panels from trace/lead integrated-skins that enabled direct integration with solar cells. This reduced total weight and shortened the integration time. The customer furnished the G10 (fiberglass) skins that already had the integrated copper traces. RWC used specialized tooling to align the face skins on the aluminum honeycomb core to keep the traces in the right location during fabrication of the approximately 2 × 2-foot structures.

“This is a great example of how we can help our customers solve their problems in innovative ways,” says Jeremy Senne, space segment director. “It was a tooling and machining challenge to work with their pre-integrated skins, but our experience on other precision programs enabled successful fabrication.”