Vibrational disturbances can ruin spacecraft surveillance missions by shaking sensitive cameras or sensors enough to cause blurred images. And when successful military missions depend on stable, virtually immovable cameras and sensors, those instruments must somehow be isolated from vibrations. In part, VISS works like shock absorbers on a car, dampening unwanted movement and preventing the camera from shaking and producing unusable pictures. The system counteracts motion to reduce by a factor of 30 the magnitude of vibrations, sufficient to isolate sensitive equipment that demands near-absolute stability. Outside the spacecraft lurks a danger of another kind-cosmic radiation.
Radiation can overload microcircuits and cause their transistors to shut down-permanently.
And dead transistors mean dead spacecraft. TSX-5 relies on a unique advanced composite bus structure built under an AFRL contract by Boeing Space and Defense. In addition to being of an innovative one-piece construction designed to be extremely lightweight with few parts, the structure was fabricated using the latest materials that easily transfer heat from any one section of the spacecraft to another.