Lunar Rover Solar Panel
Flight Hardware
PMDSAS solar array configured for design constraints of customer's lunar rover. Custom solar cell string configuration, with ability to incorporate addtional customer-specified sensors or other subsystems.
Customers typically dictates the real estate area available for solar cells on a customer-supplied, rover-unique substrate (e.g., a carbon fiber-aluminum honeycomb). Pumpkin combines this information along with rover-driven keep-out zones, connector specifications and electrical requirements to create a solar array with the string layout appropriate for the customer's requirements. Pumpkin then lays down cells onto the substrate and delivers a tested assembly ready for integration onto the rover.
Particular design & manufacturing emphasis is paid to high reliability, including redundant current paths for every electrical node, all routing performed on a single layer (i.e., no vias), strain-relieved interconnects, and extremely flat laydown via vacuum bagging.
With sufficient design flexibility, Pumpkin can quickly create a solar array with minimal NRE, extreme robustness and excellent fill factor. As an example, the lunar panel illustrated here has a very high degree of symmetry, enabling a design with only three different solar cell sub-panels along with a fourth panel responsible for power/signal routing. The entire array is maze-routed on a single layer, with neighbor-to-neighbor solar cell potential differences minimized. This particular 72-cell, 6x10S1P + 1x12S1P solar panel drives a Pumpkin EPSM 1 with two 100Wh BM2s attached (not included).
Pumpkin's PMDSAS solar panel / solar array technology has a 100% success rate in LEO and GTO orbits.
Pumpkin cannot share individual customer designs with other customers.