Commercial Orbital Rideshare Services from Venus to Ceres.

Abstract:

Xplore is proposing a deep space, rideshare mission concept using its ESPA-class spacecraft to offer payload hosting, cubesat delivery, and communication relay services anywhere from Venus to Ceres. This style of mission is particularly beneficial to solar and heliospheric physics since particles and fields instruments are relatively small and can provide scientifically useful observations on virtually any rideshare mission in the inner solar system. Xplore is developing a common bus, Xcraft, upon which it will offer mission services with small sat capability for cubesat mission prices. Xcraft will host multiple customers with approximately 35 kgs of payload (including cubesats) in a 50U volume payload bay and offer high bandwidth downlink through a 1.75m high gain X-band antenna. The spacecraft can provide ample communications, compute and power services to the hosted payloads and relay customers. Deep space payload hosting allows PIs to think science, not spacecraft.