Cold Survivable Distributed Motor Controller (CSDMC)

This paper presents the results of NASA’s COLDTECH development entitled “Cold Survivable Distributed Motor Controller (CSDMC)”. This work addresses the need to lower the mass, power and volume of the motor control electronics and its associated cabling. Landed payload mass of ocean world missions typically requires a spacecraft launch mass of 7-10x the landed mass due to the required propellant to get the payload to the surface. Reduction of landed mass leads to cheaper, more frequent missions and/or increased science return. This work addresses this need by developing a distributed electronics architecture, which places control and power electronics near or at actuators and instruments. The outcome of this effort will result in a 10X reduction in harness mass, enabling a significant increase in science payload which then enables more capable sample acquisition, delivery and analysis systems on these missions. Placing the control and power conversion electronics at or near the actuators or instruments is the cornerstone of our distributed architecture. To do this, we developed the technology necessary to distribute the electronics and place them on a shared interface and power bus. This enables a significant reduction in cable mass along with its associated complexity. This allows spacecraft designers to take advantage of volume at the extremities that would normally not be utilized. In this paper we discuss the technologies and system design to achieve these goals in support of ocean world missions. These technologies include the development of our motor control modules, a point of load regulator and isolated converter modules along with the packaging technology necessary to allow our electronics to survive the extreme temperatures.