Planetary Resources Provides a Monthly Progress Update

Planetary Resources President Chris provided a monthly update this week on how the company is progressing including displaying a full scale model of its Arkyd-100. The Arkyd-100 is the companies space telescope and technology demonstrator for their Arkyd Series prospecting missions.
From the update Lewicki said “without divulging our intellectual property, I can tell you that we’re working to make the Arkyd-100 the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that exists today. We’re drawing on our experience from traditional and private space exploration and combining it with exponential technology developments of the past few years and those to come in the next few years. With all of this we’re raising the bar on spacecraft design above anything that’s been done before.”

“In our Class 10,000 clean room, we’re focused on developing our spacecraft optics which are unique in their multifunctionality. Not only does the Arkyd-100 optic capture imagery under a wide range of wavelengths and intensity levels, but we also use it for laser communications. This innovation expands our options beyond the large dishes of the deep space network that have been used to date, as those aren’t easily scalable for our commercial use. Our small size, weight and power won’t accommodate typical deep space communications technology – which is often larger than our entire spacecraft. We’re not the only ones interested in optical communications – we’re under contract to help develop it for NASA as well.”