The Space Technology 8 mission

The Space Technology 8 (ST8) mission is the latest in NASA's New Millennium Program technology demonstration missions. ST8 includes a spacecraft bus built by industry, flying four new technology payloads in low-Earth orbit. This paper describes each payload, along with a brief description of the mission and spacecraft. The payloads include a miniature loop heat pipe intended to save mass and power on future small satellites, designed and built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; a lightweight, 35g/m linear mass, 40-m deployable boom intended as a future solar sail mast built by ATK Space Systems; a deployable, lightweight ultraflex solar array producing 175W/kg, also built by ATK Space Systems; and a high-speed, parallel-processing computer system built of state-of-the-art COTS processors, demonstrating SEU tolerance without the need for radiation-hardened electronics, and 100M operations per second per Watt processing throughput density.