Technological facilities for development, fabrication, integration and testing of solar arrays for space applications

M. A. ALURRALDE; C.G. BOLZI; J. DI SANTO; J. FERNÁNDEZ VÁZQUEZ; J. GARCÍA; L. GONZALEZ; M.L. IBARRA; M. G. MARTÍNEZ BOGADO; S. MUÑOZ; J.M. OLIMA; J. PEREZ; D. RAGGIO; O. ROMANELLI; C. RINALDI; H. P. SOCOLOVSKY; M. J. L. TAMASI

Utah State University

Conferencia; 31st Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites -2017 Big Data; 2017

AIAA/USU

The Solar Energy Department (DES) of the Argentine National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) performs R&D activities related with photovoltaic solar energy conversion for space and terrestrial applications.Sensors and solar cells have been integrated into several Argentine Satellite Missions, for ex. SAC-A satellite, SAC-D and actually SAOCOM 1A and 1B missions. Several Argentinian small satellites have being developed by Satellogic -a private company-. The solar array of Cubebug-1, Cubebug-2, BugSat- 1, NewSat-1 and NewSat-2 have been integrated with commercial ATJ solar cells at CNEA labs. This paper describes the technological facilities for the development, fabrication, integration and testing of solar arrays for space applications at DES-CNEA labs. It should be remarked that NASA and ESA documents have been taken as references for these developments .Relevant issues such as, solar cells and diodes characterization, set up of soldering and bonding processes, radiation damage and development of testing techniques, are presented. The DES activities on flight components carried out in two clean rooms - Class 10,000 and Class 100,000 and a specialist electronics lab. Other development work are carried out in different facilities belonging to the Tandar Accelerator Laboratory, CNEA.In space applications solar cells are protected by coverglasses from UV exposure and from low energy charged particles. An activities related to bonding techniques are development. These are bonding coverglasses to cells, bonding stringed cells to substrate, bonding buses to substrate, bonding cables and electronic devices to substrate