Supporting Uranus Exploration with Deployable Small Spacecraft Probes

We present a mission concept to study the capability for a parent spacecraft to transmit power and remotely manipulate a small probe spacecraft, potentially as small as a chipsat, which is a spacecraft constructed on a single printed circuit board, through a laser transmitter. This concept, referred to as sustained chipsat/CubeSat activity through transmitted electromagnetic radiation, enables the mothership to intermittently deploy probes to make distributed measurements where the use of only photovoltaic, battery, or radioisotope power sources would be infeasible. Using these probes during a long-duration deep space mission to Uranus would provide enhanced scientific measurements such as magnetic field gradients, leading to a better understanding of the ice giants, which are the least explored planets in our solar system. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of using a mothership-based laser for wireless power transfer, translation and attitude control, and communication of probes ranging from a minimal-mass chipsat to a 3U CubeSat, where U refers to a standard 10 cm CubeSat volume. We find that the best performance is achieved with an intermediate probe size, corresponding to a 0.5U CubeSat, which could capture over an order of magnitude more power than the chipsat while being agile enough to maintain attitude control using laser photon pressure.