Welcome to the official wiki for the CNC Optical Channel Observer (COCO). COCO was developed for the Multimode Electrospray Propulsion research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supervised by Professor Joshua Rovey.
Multi-mode Electrospray propulsion is a game-changing technology enabling small satellites with unprecedented mission flexibility. Multi-mode propulsion utilizes two or more propulsion methods on a single spacecraft with a high-thrust mode and a high-specific impulse mode. In order to achieve this task, a thruster array containing thousands of micro-channels is used. Throughout it’s development, the array is exposed to a number of factors that affect the integrity of the channels. COCO was developed as a direct response to this problem. The system is a three-axis CNC microscope array interrogator capable of reliable, repeatable interrogations of the multi-mode thruster array. The system is modular to accept varying array sizes, specifically for the full-scale array and the upcoming sub-scale array.