Mechanisms

Quartus’ experience developing reliable mechanisms for challenging spaceborne and airborne environments spans a variety of applications – from precision pointing electro-opto-mechanical devices for free space laser communication satellite constellations to simple yet highly reliable launch restraint designs. Our innovative team can offer a full suite of engineering services to address your challenging application.

CAPABILITIES

Complete Development Cycle

• Requirements definition, systems engineering, conceptual trade study, risk reduction testing, detailed mechanism design/analysis, assembly, integration, and test

• Cleanroom environment

Spaceborne and Airborne Applications

• Positioning and pointing systems

• Launch restraints

• Spacecraft deployables

• Flight control actuators

• UAV launch systems

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Flight control surface actuator linkage design and analysis

Structural FEM

CASE STUDY 
Spaceborne coarse pointing mechanism with launch lock for laser communication

Quartus engineers designed, analyzed, built, and fully tested a spaceborne dual axis gimbal mechanism for high-throughput optical inter-satellite links. The effort focused on lowering manufacturing costs, minimizing complexity, and reducing risk for high volume manufacturing (targeted +1,000 per year) for a coarse pointing assembly and launch lock device for satellite constellation communication. The coarse pointing assembly was capable of providing precision line-of-sight articulation over a near-hemispherical field of regard, all while using mainly commercial off-the-shelf components.

Prototype assembly

“…we turned this entire prototype around in just over 6 months from mostly clean sheets of paper to working prototypes…it is our nimble and development-supporting vendors, such as Quartus (a rare bird in this manner), who really made the program a success.”
-Matt Michel, Northrop Grumman Docking Mechanisms System Architect

2020 NASA Langley - Small Business Sub-contractor of the Year