HISS provides technology leadership with an engineering office in Crofton Maryland. Our staff has expertise in Mechanical, Electrical, Thermal and Systems Engineering in addition to Mechanical Technology expertise including the fabrication and installation of thermal control hardware such as Multi Layer Insulation Systems and Plume Shields.

HawkSat-1

Hawk is also in the final stages of fabrication and testing of HawkSat-I, the first in a series of our own state of the art CubeSats. HawkSat-I will be launched from NASA´s Wallops Flight Facility in the autumn of 2008.

Multi Layer Insulation

Multi Layer Insulation (MLI) is critical to successful spacecraft performance. Our engineers and technicians have years of experience in the design and fabrication of thermal control systems that have been used in spacecraft ranging from the largest vehicles such as the Hubble Space Telescope to the Multi Payload Ejector to CubeSats. We are currently developing the MLI for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

Thermal Control Analysis and Design

Hawk Institute for Space Sciences (HISS) design and analysis team produces the thermal control solutions for academia, government and industry. HISS uses state-of-the-art thermal modeling techniques and software to develop a thermal control system (TCS) that meets the thermal requirements such as, predicting beginning-of-life and end-of-life temperatures and heater power estimates for instruments, spacecraft, satellites and other space hardware.

The thermal team has extensive experience in the design, analysis and testing spaceflight hardware. Recent programs include Earth Observing-1, THEMIS and TacSAT-3. The HISS thermal design team is currently leading the thermal analysis and design effort for the NASA/GSFC Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. The Spacecraft thermal control system was developed using detailed models with state-of-the-art software; made to predict flight temperatures; supported thermal design reviews; specified the thermal hardware (heaters, thermostats, thermistors, coatings, MLI); prepared the observatory Thermal Vacuum (TV) and Thermal Balance (TB) test plans, and made to support all launch site and post launch activities.