Aerospace demonstrates DiskSats in low-Earth orbit
SALT LAKE CITY – The Aerospace Corp. is continuing to demonstrate the viability of pancake-shaped DiskSats in the wake of their December launch on a Rocket Lab Electron.
"It's the biggest advancement in containerized satellites since cubesats were introduced in the early 2000s," Darren Rowen, DiskSat demonstration mission chief engineer, told SpaceNews.
After launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, four DiskSats were deployed from Aerospace's custom-built dispenser to an altitude of 550 kilometers. The 17-kilogram DiskSats are descending about two kilometers per month due to atmospheric drag as engineers proceed with commissioning of Enpulsion Nano Field Emission Electric Propulsion systems.
The Enpulsion thrusters are needed to move the DiskSats to very low Earth orbit (VLEO), an altitude of less than 300 kilometers.
"Propulsive lowering and sustainment at lower altitude is coming next," said Catherine Venturini, DiskSat demonstration mission principal investigator.
DiskSats are strikingly different from traditional microsatellites. The bus with a 1-meter diameter and 2.5-centimeter depth was constructed with carbon fiber composite facesheets bonded to an aluminum-honeycomb core.
Because of the unusual form factor, Aerospace engineers redesigned or modified satellite power management, communications, attitude control and thermal subsystems.
"The early-orbit phase of the DiskSat mission was a time of intense learning from ‘firsts' on many fronts," Rowen, Venturini and co-authors wrote in "DiskSat: On-Orbit Performance and Lessons Learned from the Inaugural Flight of TwoDimensional Satellites," a paper presented at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference. "With nearly every subsystem being new, whether it was the bus, the dispenser, the S-band radio, or the ground network, the operations team faced a steep learning curve."
Thermal control was one challenge since thrusters, payloads, star trackers and other components were mounted on DiskSat exteriors.
"We had to do a lot of engineering to figure out how to keep them from getting too hot and too cold," Rowen said.
The custom-built dispenser was another big risk because "if it doesn't work, the mission is over," Rowen said.
Once in orbit, Aerospace engineers discovered stray light reaching star trackers, a problem they remedied by revising DiskSat's concept of operations.
Battery heaters drawing power unequally caused more serious problems. Engineers were able to mitigate a flaw in the battery heater design through software. By the time the change "was fully implemented and uploaded, both batteries on DiskSat C and one battery on DiskSat A were permanently disabled," according to the paper.
"This was a painful lesson learned," Rowen said Aug. 24 in at the Small Satellite Conference. "Despite this outcome, the mission is on track to complete all of the mission objectives successfully."
While conducting the demonstration mission, the Aerospace Corp. is transferring DiskSat technology. Neumann Space, Orbotic Systems and Satlyt have signed DiskSat commercial licensing agreements. Additional companies have expressed interest.
"The success to this demo is not only the actual technology and proof of concept, but this parallel effort of getting it out there to trying to build an industrial base to build their own DiskSats in the future," Venturini said.
Thank you for reading the article!
