T.H.E.I.A

Terrestrial High Efficiency Imaging Apparatus

Before diving into my capstone project, I cannot emphasize enough how much this team means to me. On the first day of the Fall 2023 semester, I did not know I would be meeting teammates that would make up one of the best group projects of my career, but more importantly, I did not know I would be meeting my best friends. This team showcased the best teamwork I had ever seen to this point: everyone had their niche subject they were confident in and would not shy away from stepping out of their comfort zone to assist wherever needed. With each milestone, the team showcased the ability to adapt, control the workload, and fire on all cylinder when it mattered most. At the time of writing this paragraph, the final presentation and tech report had been showcased and submitted. To team THEIA, thank you!

THEIA on graduation day

T.H.E.I.A. - Environmental/Testing Lead, Electrical Co-Lead Aug. '23 - May '24

T.H.E.I.A. is a senior design project where the mission is to design, develop, test, and deploy a 3U CubeSat to image and document the GEO belt for space situational awareness purposes. Although this project is entirely hypothetical, it has heightened everyone's awareness of the immense detail engineering encompasses when faced with a real-world scenario. Before the preliminary design class, course work consisted of the most ideal problems with unlimited resources at disposal.

SRR (October 2023)

As the Environmental Engineering lead, I have researched detail leading to the determination of our orbit and how environmental attributes will affect the spacecraft. Although still in the preliminary research phase of the project, we plan to contact vendors regarding power consumption and information regarding rad-hard/rad-tolerant electronics as well as other resources regarding thermal testing, outgassing prevention, and cleanroom use for assembly.

As the Electrical Engineering co-lead, the first iteration of the primary internal and external interfaces were mapped out, anticipating a more complex design as the semester progresses. Although there was not much emphasis on the electrical side of the project for the system readiness review, there will be an uptick in work dedicated to this area as a more detailed design is considered in the near future.

PDR (November 2023)

Continuing from the SRR, my tasks were to update the mission ConOps to include a more detailed approach for preflight, assembly and testing, and post-flight. With the help of the Integration Engineer, I was able to draft a basic algorithm the CubeSat would use to categorize stars and RSOs that will be further improved on in the future.

For this milestone, the team was required to conduct at least two trade studies regarding parts to be used by the spacecraft. However, going above and beyond, the team decided to knock out all trade studies to finalize the entire part selection process. From this, the use of rad-hardened electronics is to be used throughout the entire CubeSat design, but the initial use of Kevlar to line more exposed areas of the CubeSat is still on the table. With these parts selected, the team was able to improve the interface layout of the CubeSat where specific parts were selected for their multifunction properties: the chosen camera, for instance, is to be used as a camera and a star-tracking device, eliminating the use for a separate star tracker, thus saving cost.

CDR (February 2024)

Starting the semester with preparation for the CDR, the group went to work adding onto the CAD design with finalizing parts, designing any custom parts that were needed, and selecting fasteners for the design. Despite not contributing to the CAD up to this point, I plan to assist in the thermal and radiation testing simulations. Similarly, my task going forward is to write the assembly and hypothetical testing standard operating procedures.

As for the deliverable, I added to the already established ConOps by better specifying different phases for the mission. Having taken critique from the advisory panel, the main objective for this deliverable was to emphasize on the categorization of images: with every image batch, the satellite will compress each image, initiate an edge detection and centroiding software, then stack each image to determine RSOs and stars within each image batch.

ORR (April 2024)

With the final milestone approaching, the team was tasked with creating documents regarding assembly, cleanliness, and deployment in addition to component drawings and analyses. With that, my position changed from Environmental Engineer to Test Engineer, as I was in charge of all CAD analyses and writing the assembly SOP.

Starting with the CAD, I modeled a simplified version of every component used in the CubeSat before any analyses were done. From here, the CubeSat was rebuilt using the simplified models and thrust into the thermal analysis. In this analysis, a convection study was selected with a heat power of 1361W and an ambient temperature of 398K directed to the top solar panel. Because the CubeSat does not feature deployable solar panels, the temperature difference is nearly negligible.

With that, a buckling analysis was done with two studies: force in the negative Y direction and positive X direction. Here, both studies featured a fixed support at the end of the CubeSat. In both studies, the maximum buckling observed was 1e-3 AMPRES. Similarly, a stress, strain, and deformation study were plotted.