The case of project ULTRA

Project ULTRA goal is to develop a Laser Ablation Propulsion (LAP) engine for miniaturized satellites with form factor of 10cm cube multiples. A class of satellites best known as ‘CubeSats’.

Laser Ablation Propulsion (LAP) has been proposed as a satellite propulsion technique since the 1970’s, with primer focus on its extremely efficient performance (thrust generated per kilogram of fuel consumed). However, both in literature as well as in actual implementations, LAP always used pulsed/ultrafast (ns and fs) lasers to ablate ‘fuels’, the cost, size and power needs of which (pulsed lasers) made their use on the CubeSat platforms impossible.

Building on Opticon’s experience in Thin Film Laser processing, and Laser assisted Polymer Ablation procedures, we are developing, to the best of our knowledge, the first propulsion engine that will be able to scale LAP in less than 10cm^3 of volume, at 1/10 the cost of similarly performing engines for CubeSat applications.

Thrust will be generated through ablating polymers (‘fuels’) and using the momentum of their ejected/ablated fragments. To ablate the ‘fuel’, well focused, miniature sized, CW diode lasers will be used. In order to generate ablation phenomena at low intensities (in the KW/cm^2 range) – which are possible to generate with such lasers.

Τhe project is co‐financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH – CREATE – INNOVATE (project code:T2EDK-01119)