During my 2017-2018 school year (Junior year of undergrad), I worked on a NASA Student Launch team at Florida Tech. Our main goal of the project was to design and manufacture a rocket to reach an altitude of one mile. Additionally, once the rocket landed, a rover was to deploy and setup solar panels five feet away autonomously. I was a part of the systems, rover and safety sub-teams. My main goals on these sub-teams was to ensure the rover was following the required safety standards, helped develop requirements for the rover, made sure the rover adhered to those requirements, made sure those requirements were verified and helped design/manufacture the rover. Because of the amount of work that was required with all three sub-teams, I was putting in 25-30 hours a week on top of my other classes, projects and clubs.
The systems team was also in charge of developing testing procedures for the rocket and rover sub-systems, mainly testing related to maximum allowable stress. For the rover I developed testing procedures for the body tube of the rover payload (compression test), electronics testing for the payload bay and electronics testing of the rover itself. These results were analysed to see if they met the conditions and requirements for the components to be considered satisfactory.
As a member of the safety team, we developed an Personal Hazard Analysis (PHA), Project Risk table, any environmental concerns, a Risk Assessment Chart and a Failure Modes, Effects and Analysis (FMEA) table. These tables and charts ensured the safety of the team, environment and bystanders by allowing us to come up with mitigation for those safety concerns. These concerns could then have a less severe impact or could be prevented. Launch procedures were created to ensure a proper checklist was followed before launch which is similar to a pre-flight checklist for an aircraft.
The rover team first had to brainstorm ideas for a design of not only the rover, but also how to deploy the rover from the rocket. One of the main challenges of this process was working around the space requirements and how to manage the rocket landing so the hatch door was against the ground. After a few weeks of brainstorming, we started making preliminary Computer-Aided Engineering (CAD) designs using PTC Creo Parametric. We modeled the payload bay and the rover. The payload bay had the capability to hold the rover in the bay using solenoid latches while the hatch door was locked in place via a small DC motor with a set screw. There were a lot of electrical components within these two systems with a Raspberry Pi in each being the microcontroller of choice because of the higher amount of capabilities it had compared to the Arduino. This allowed for a live feed to be made to a control box which had a small LCD screen.
After submitting our Critical Design Report (CDR), we started manufacturing the rocket, payload bay and the rover. We cut out the body tube for the bay, 3D printed the rover components to piece together while the rest of the rocket was being developed. However, we ordered our parts several months ahead of time, but our rover electrical components were late except for one of the Raspberry Pis. Additionally, our nose cone was late so we contacted the seller and order another, but these were not delivered in time for us to preform a test launch. This test launch was required for us to include our test data into our Flight Readiness Review (FRR). Since we didn't have this data, we were not able to continue in the competition because of this. However, we still finished building the rocket and rover bay minus the rover. We launched the rocket successfully with a maximum apogee of around one mile. As an added bonus, the rocket was recovered successful with little to no damage.
I learned from this issue with parts not being delivered on time and took this into account during my senior design project talked about in another project section. As the team lead of my senior design team, I ordered multiple parts and ordered them ahead of time so we would have more time for testing and integration. This allowed us to finish our final product one week ahead of schedule.
Acknowledgements:
Credit to Michael Kalenty for the great photos. I am thankful for great, helpful teammates throughout this project as well as the great leadership on the sub-teams I was on. Thank you to all the faculty and mentors from Florida Tech that helped made this project happen. A thank you goes out to NASA as well for allowing us to participate in this competition.
