Structural Characterization of a TriTruss Module

The TriTruss is a novel structural module developed by researchers at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) that can be used in space to assemble large support structures for a variety of applications. One such application is the metering truss or primary mirror backbone support structure of an In-Space Assembled Telescope (iSAT). For the iSAT application, the TriTruss will be supporting mirror segments, payloads, and instruments, all of which require the TriTruss to have a high stiffness. Structural characterization from testing and analysis is needed to ensure the integrity of the struts that make up a TriTruss module is maintained when subjected to loads representative of the application. The test setup and loads applied to the TriTruss module as well as the analytical methods used to predict the response of the structure under conditions representative of those implemented during testing will be discussed. Also, the results obtained from testing and analysis will be summarized. The goal for the characterization study was to achieve a correlation within 10% between the test data and the analysis. Overall, the correlation varied for the struts with a few struts still having a larger error margin after further studies were conducted to improve the correlation through additional analysis.