Description: Spacecraft for NASA, DoD and commercial missions need higher power, higher voltage, and much lower cost solar arrays to enable a variety of very high power missions. Power for these missions is envisioned to reach from 30kW-300kW in the near term and to 1MW in the future. Conventional solar arrays are simply not up to the challenge for many reasons. High efficiency, space-qualified solar cells are in themselves costly, > $250/Watt, and there is considerable additional cost associated with the large number of piece-parts and labor needed to assemble the cells into the Photovoltaic Assembly. The current approach has many assembly steps, and has evolved with only minor changes from solar arrays fabricated in the 1970s, sacrificing cost because of risk adverse incremental development. If a very low cost solar cell could be implemented, while being complemented by economical automated solar array integration processes, and having environmental durability, then extensive cost savings could be realized, thus enabling energy intensive next generation missions. The proposed innovation is a very low cost durable PVA which has integrated construction designed for manufacturability, and active array management for voltage and current regulation. By utilizing mature thin film CIGS technology, along with Vanguard proprietary coverglass replacement technology (CGR), and automated integration and lamination processes, an extremely thin flexible lightweight and low cost solar array can be realized.

Benefits: Low cost, lightweight, high power solar arrays with compact packaging and high voltage capability is an enabling technology for meeting the key NASA objective of implementing solar electric propulsion, which enables enhanced planetary, human exploration, and orbit transfer missions. With these missions projecting prime power growth to 25 - 300kW, the automated assembly of THINC arrays with today's CIGS solar cells meets these needs with improved specific power by a factor of >3X, an improved volumetric efficiency when stowed for launch by a factor of >8X, and a PVA cost reduction of >70% compared to today's solar arrays. These improvements, together with demonstrated high operating voltage capability exceeding 300V, allow an affordable high power system up to hundreds of kW to be packaged into a single launch. The THINC Array also has the advantages of improved high voltage stability and electromagnetic cleanliness because of surface continuity available from encapsulation, with similar technology developed at Vanguard already transitioned through a NASA Phase III SBIR to the Magnetospheric MultiScale MMS mission.

The trend towards Solar Electric Propulsion to supplant chemical propulsion for orbit-raising and station-keeping, and the advent of "all-electric" spacecraft which use SEP for orbital transfer and station-keeping, have driven the need for both higher power and higher voltage in commercial and DoD spacecraft. Commercial spacecraft have trended toward higher power to also provide more capability (e.g. more bandwidth or coverage) which translates directly to increased revenue for the spacecraft operator. Additional functionality for military spacecraft, including enhanced communication, reconnaissance, and on-orbit computational capabilities, as well as the maneuverability afforded by SEP also drive to higher power requirements. The implementation of a low mass, low volume, low cost array with improved cost and environmental robustness benefits all of these applications.