Vantage helps sponsor Maryland Aerospace Day. Vantage was a proud sponsor for the 2024 Maryland Aerospace States Association’s annual Aerospace Day with the Maryland Space Business Roundtable and Maryland Department of Commerce.

Vantage is providing thermal engineering support and building flight Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets for Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to be installed on the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) instrument. WFI is a wide-field heliospheric imager (HI) design based on STEREO/HI. WFI images from 18 to 180 R☉ on the sky. HI designs are analogous to coronagraphs, but in linear instead of circular geometry. WFI attenuates direct sunlight by over 16 orders of magnitude.

The wide-field achromatic optics are based on the famous Nagler eyepiece in reverse geometry. Polarization and detection use the same PFW and CCA designs as NFI. PUNCH includes three copies of WFI, to achieve the required observing cadence. Vantage Technicians are working closely with the SwRI team to ensure our MLI will provide the necessary protection to this vital scientific instrument, which is planned for launch in the spring of 2025. 

Vantage has delivered thermal Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets in support of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) for the Mars-moon Exploration with GAmma rays and NEutrons (MEGANE) spectroscopy instrument.

MEGANE will provide vital information on the composition of the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos as part of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission that is being developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The MMX spacecraft plans to visit the Martian moon Phobos, land on the surface, collect a surface sample, and then deliver that sample to Earth.

On behalf of NASA, APL is leading and building MEGANE with support from Vantage’s Thermal Engineering Team. Our Team delivered the final flight MLI and installed it prior to spacecraft delivery.

Vantage built and delivered the first set of thermal Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets for Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to be installed on the Solar Wind Plasma Sensor (SWiPS) instrument. SWiPS is going to be installed on the Space Weather Follow On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) mission, which is a deep-space mission operating in a Lissajous orbit at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 1 (L1) point, enabling upstream measurements of solar wind disturbances before they reach Earth.

It will provide continuous measurements of the sun’s corona and of the solar wind at the L1 point and transmit continuous real-time data to Earth. The SWFO-L1 SWiPS is two identical top-hat electrostatic analyzers that measure the velocity, density, and temperature of solar wind ions.

SWiPS provides real-time, around-the-clock observations of the plasma structures directed toward Earth. SWiPS monitors the solar wind for abrupt changes, which can result from interplanetary shocks, coronal mass ejections, corotating interaction regions or high-speed solar wind, because these can cause geomagnetic storms that are harmful to life and technology. Vantage is proud of our thermal engineering team that has continued to provide outstanding support to SwRI’s cutting-edge instrument development efforts.

Vantage is providing thermal Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) for NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission. Our Team is responsible for design, assembly, and fabrication of flight and non-flight MLI and we are independently designing the flight quality MLI for spacecraft and instrument applications.

Our Team will install the flight and non-flight MLI for test support and space flight final integration and we are leading the installation of thermal control hardware (heaters, thermostats, temperature sensors, etc.). NASA’s IMAP mission, which JHU/APL is building in partnership with Principal Investigator David McComas of Princeton University, will explore our solar neighborhood, called the heliosphere — decoding the messages in particles from the Sun and beyond our cosmic shield.

Vantage built and delivered the engineering model and flight thermal Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets for Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) for the Magnetic Anomaly Particle Spectrometer (MAPS), which is to fly on NASA’s Lunar Vertex lander-rover mission.

MAPS will study the interaction of the solar wind with surface materials on the Moon, aiming to understand the origin of swirling patterns of bright and dark soil that coincide with localized swaths of magnetic fields. The Vantage team built, installed and helped test the engineering and flight MLI blankets that provide passive thermal control to the instrument while in the vacuum of space.

They work by limiting the amount of radiative heat transfer through multiple layers of thin reflectors and spacer materials. Vantage is proud of our thermal engineering team that has built and delivered another high-quality product to support a critical scientific Lunar mission.

Vantage is building four sets of flight quality Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets and ground wires for Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to be installed on the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) spacecraft. SwRI is leading PUNCH, a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission that will integrate understanding of the Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere visible during total solar eclipses, with the “solar wind” that fills the solar system.

The solar wind, a supersonic stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun, fills the heliosphere, the bubble-like region of space encompassing our solar system. Its boundary, where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance, ends the sphere of the Sun’s influence. PUNCH’s four satellites are going to visualize and image how the solar corona transitions into the solar wind. PUNCH is scheduled to launch in April of 2025.

Our blankets are designed to meet the mission requirements for resistivity of ≤ 1 ohm and are fabricated in our facilities. Vantage is very proud of the hard work our Thermal Engineering Team is performing in support to our continued customer SwRI.

NASA has awarded the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Software Engineering Support III (SES III) contract to Mitchell Vantage Systems, LLC (MVS). MVS is a joint venture between MCSG Technologies and Vantage.

MVS will provide products and services expertise to support flight software, ground software, and science data systems, as well as software technology infusion, mission environments, software engineering, software systems engineering, secure coding, software/data systems project management, mission operations, and mission validation for the Software Engineering Division (SED) of GSFC’s Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD).

The SES III contract supports overall ETD efforts that focus on the development of reusable, secure flight and ground architectures and frameworks to reduce mission costs, maximize development schedules, minimize customer programmatic/technical risks, and increase the scientific value of information products. The SES III work will be performed primarily at GSFC (including at its Wallops location), and at the contractor facilities.

The SES III contract is an SBA small business 8(a) set-aside, cost-plus-fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract. The total contract value is $359 million with a five-year period of performance, beginning April 1, 2022. The contract phase-in period starts on February 1, 2022. Vantage has been supporting NASA GSFC and its exciting and groundbreaking missions for nearly thirty years and is tremendously excited to continue providing our exceptional support via the SES III contract.

Vantage is providing thermal Multilayer Insulation (MLI) blankets to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) for the Europa Imaging System (EIS). The EIS is an essential part of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which consists of two cameras: a wide-angle camera that will acquire a continuous image swath, in color and stereo, along the surface under the orbiting spacecraft; and a gimbal-mounted, high-resolution narrow-angle camera that will reveal features as small as 3 feet across as it performs global mapping and regional stereo imaging.

Vantage’s Thermal Engineering Team is designing and fabricating the instrument test and flight blankets, ensuring the delivered flight blankets meet the demands of this critical instrument’s requirements to effectively operate to provide unprecedented high-resolution images and new insights into Europa’s icy shell and the ocean that lies beneath it.