Low-cost science laboratory in microgravity using a CubeSat centrifuge framework

Gravity is known to play a critical part in many physical, biological and technological processes that we take for granted on Earth. Long duration human spaceflight has shown the critical importance and dangers to human life, particularly with the irreversible loss of bone calcium and the challenges with growing food and plant-life in microgravity. Long duration human spaceflight can be made feasible by introducing artificial gravity. However previous concepts contained a spinning spacecraft 'attached' to a stationary one such as the ISS which imparts high complexity and cost. The focus of this paper is a scalable, 6U, CubeSat with the ability to deploy and extends its pair of experiment chambers a distance of up to 2.5 meter using, spinning at up to 19 rev/min to generate one g. Our current work focuses on investigating the concept feasibility, system design, deployment mechanism and power.