Micro Cathode Arc Thruster PhoneSat Experiment for Small Satellites

NASA Ames Research center and George Washington University have been working together to increase the TRL level of a micro arc cathode thruster developed by GWU by integrating the system into the ARC PhoneSat bus. The main objectives of the collaboration were (1) to build a test bench in which a phone, running the PhoneSat firmware and a custom designed Android App could fire several thrusters in vacuum at the same time and (2) to design a CAD model of a <3U model that could incorporate the PhoneSat bus, the thruster avionics and the thrusters themselves. This paper presents how the interfaces of these two systems were developed, as well as the results obtained during the testing phase.