MichSpace

by: Veronica Benitez - Thermal Engineering Intern at Goddard Space Flight Center and MEng Student

This summer I had the opportunity to work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I interned in the Thermal Engineering branch and worked with the thermal team of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite. Working in the Thermal Engineering Branch has been an incredible learning experience. Aside from my primary project, I was able to work on many important tasks that a thermal engineer would complete in a typical work day including both analysis and testing.

On the thermal analysis and modeling side, I gained familiarity with the software used at GSFC mainly Thermal Desktop and SINDA Fluint. I was able to work with Thermal Desktop in tutorials and real thermal problems. I used SINDA Fluint to create the multiple cases of my primary project.

On the integration and testing side, I created multiple Work Order Authorization forms and helped test real flight hardware. I was put in charge of a thermal blanket bakeout for GPM Multilayer Insulation blankets as well as a Chotherm bakeout. I created the Work Order Authorization forms for both, made sure they were approved by the Quality Assurance Engineers as well as the Contamination Engineers. I was able to contribute to the thermal vacuum testing of the solar array drive assembly (SADA) by attending shifts to monitor the temperature of the chamber and the various components of the SADA. I also helped install thermocouples on the avionics module of the GPM satellite and route them to the proper location for connection.

My primary project at GSFC was the statistical analysis of the thermal margins of the GPM spacecraft. The average spacecraft designed at GFSC is proposed to last three to four years; however, the majority of these spacecraft are consistently lasting anywhere from ten to fifteen years. The result of the longer spacecraft life may be due to overdesign by assuming accumulated worst case scenarios. The purpose of my study is to assess the degree of margin and conservatism in the GPM thermal design that may be masked by designing to stacked, worst case conditions. The assessment contains the analysis of how the temperature and heater power of the critical spacecraft components vary over the lifetime of the spacecraft when four different variables are adjusted: power dissipation, optical properties, beta angle, and seasonal flux.

A distribution plot of the temperature ranges was created to analyze what percent of the mission lifetime the spacecraft critical components will spend at various margin ranges from operational. The impact of conservatism on each of the four variables can be studied independently to evaluate how much margin is absorbed or generated by using the extreme variables instead of nominal values. The end result of this study will be a way of quantifying the degree of conservatism in the GPM Observatory thermal design based on the traditional design approach used by the GSFC Thermal Branch.

by: Jimmy Gawron – Systems Engineering Intern at Orbital Sciences Corporation and MEng Student

This summer I had the awesome opportunity of working at Orbital as a systems engineering intern. I worked in the Science and Technology Business Development group where I was responsible for the technical design of spacecraft buses and end-to-end space missions for several NASA proposals. This involved the first order sizing of the spacecraft bus to accommodate payload requirements, the design of the communications architecture, and determination of the mission operations. I was given a lot of responsibility on high profile ventures, which provided for an exciting summer. I found Orbital’s work environment to be very high energy, and the internship helped to enhance my engineering and team working skills.

On Monday, the Obama administration announced its 2010 budget for NASA. It cancels plans to return to the moon by 2020 and focuses on using commercial companies to ferry astronauts to and from orbit.

While some are up in arms over the future of human spaceflight, Buzz Aldrin is backing the president in an editorial in The Huffington Post.

Aldrin calls Obama's decision his "JFK moment." He praises the president for deciding "to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015."

Aldrin has been far from shy about criticizing the Constellation program, previously calling the launch of its prototype rocket, Ares I-X, "fake" and "a little more than a half-a-billion dollar political show." He thinks that NASA should be spending taxpayer dollars on developing technology for trips to Mars, and he backs a "flexible path" plan that would "redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons."

NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden, said in a press conference Tuesday that he and senior White House officials will spend the next few months devising a new overarching goal for NASA, and a schedule for developing technologies to send astronauts to destinations as yet unknown.

But Obama's budget proposal still has to be approved by congress. "My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program," Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement.

Source: www.technologyreview.com

Today is NASA's Day of Remembrance. Its done to honor the astronauts lost during the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger accident, and the Columbia accident
Note: - I will not be showing images of the actual accidents themselves. You can find that relatively easily on Wikipedia if you want

The Apollo 1 fire happened on January 27, 1967.



On board were Virgil I "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee



The Challenger accident happened on January 28th, 1986.

The crew consisted of Commander Francis "Dick" Scobee, Pilot Michael J Smith, Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist Ronald McNair, Payload Specialist Sharon Christa McAuliffe, and Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis.


The Columbia accident happened on Feburary 1, 2003

The crew consisted of Commander Rick Husband (Air Force Colonel), Pilot William McCool (Navy Commander),Payload Commander Michael Anderson (Air Force Lieutenant colonel), Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon (Israeli's first astronaut, Israeli Air Force Colonel), Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist David Brown (Navy Captain), and Mission Specialist Laurel Clark (US Navy Captain)

Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.

Ad Astra Per Aspera