NASA’s ICESat-2 Satellite Carries 3D Printed PEKK Bracket
NASA’s follow-on to the successful ICESat mission will employ a never-before-flown technique for determining the topography of ice sheets and the thickness of sea ice, but that won’t be the only first for this mission. Slated for launch in 2018, NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) also will carry a 3-D printed part made of polyetherketoneketone (PEKK) , a material that has never been used in 3-D manufacturing, let alone flown in space. “This is a first for this material,” said Craig Auletti, lead production engineer on ICESat-2’s only instrument, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) now being built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The part is a bracket that supports the instrument’s fiber-optic cables. PEKK Offers Advantages Instrument developers chose PEKK because it’s strong, but perhaps more important, it’s electrostatically dissipative — that is, it reduces the build up of static electricity to protect elec