ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,358,649, issued on July 15, was assigned to AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES INC. (Seattle).
"Extensible boom device" was invented by Kevin Tebbe (Fairfax, Va.), Michael Joseph Dergance (Redmond, Wash.) and Keith Miller (Seattle).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A telescopic boom system provides an extensible boom that may be used in spacecraft applications including supporting photovoltaic panels, communication antennas, instrumentation, and so forth. A stowed configuration is volumetrically compact, including the boom and actuators such as a motor. During deployment, threaded nuts for each nested section of the boom are self-aligning with respect to a...