As Morgan Farrier watched the Jan. 13 launch of USC’s third satellite, Dodona, driving on SpaceX’s Transporter 3 mission, she noticed her contributions since final spring turn into a actuality. Farrier, a sophomore majoring in astronautical engineering, labored on the mission’s Marina del Rey floor station in mission operations to create the satellite that will hitch a trip to orbit as a part of SpaceX’s Smallsat Rideshare Program.
Dodona is a mission directed by analysis professor David Barnhart from the Space Engineering Research Center, a joint analysis middle inside the Viterbi School of Engineering Department of Astronautical Engineering and the Information Sciences Institute.
“Part of the mission of the SERC [is] to do advanced research in various space engineering disciplines, at different levels,” Barnhart mentioned. “I refer to [SERC] as a space engineering teaching hospital because it’s intended to give students hands-on experience that they normally potentially wouldn’t get during their academic curriculum before they go out into industry or government to do it full-time.”
Partnered with the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin, a bunch of undergraduate and graduate students working alongside workers at SERC undertook Dodona to combine an internally constructed Cubesat mini satellite that was the dimensions of a bread field — 10 centimeters lengthy and vast, and 30 centimeters excessive — to check Lockheed Martin’s latest payload applied sciences in orbit. This expertise is a part of Lockheed Martin’s bigger La Jument program, with Dodona being the primary in a collection of demonstration flights.
“Our job is to build a satellite for them, essentially, make sure that payload gets into space, points where it needs to point and then can bring its data back to the ground, and we can talk to it from the ground,” mentioned Julia Schatz, a graduate pupil finding out pc science and aerospace engineering who works at SERC.
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The course of the 12 months-lengthy mission was beset by a number of challenges. In addition to a myriad of technical difficulties and the students’ incomplete information of satellite integrating, the coronavirus pandemic was probably the most critical of them, Barnhart mentioned. Collaborators had been prohibited from getting into the laboratory because the time received nearer to Jan. 13, the confirmed launch date.
When Barnhart’s staff obtained approval to return to the laboratory, there have been protocols put in place for private protecting tools, which introduced new challenges to staff members as solely two of them might work, six ft aside, within the laboratory.
“The biggest hurdle that we had to face was because we’re working so close together; working apart six feet or making sure that there’s only two people in the lab was very difficult to actually just get progress, to actually get stuff done,” mentioned Eugene Park, a masters pupil finding out electrical and electronics engineering and engineering/industrial administration.
Under stringent coronavirus-associated protocols, the mission progressed at a a lot slower tempo than anticipated, and the staff’s timeline to check and combine the satellite was additionally significantly compressed. It wasn’t till August, Park mentioned, that the mission “really started to pick up.”
“In the case of the satellite, there is a marker in the sand called the launch date,” Barnhart mentioned. “You can’t miss the launch date.”
During the mission, pupil researchers commuted practically an hour to Marina del Rey, which required them to fastidiously stability their time when dealing with totally different class schedules and different time commitments.
“Luckily, we had a strict rule of at most 16 hours a week, so even if people really want to volunteer, we want to make sure you get your minimum done, but also that school was a priority,” Park mentioned.
Plowing by way of multi-layered obstacles introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, together with accommodating pupil researchers of various class schedules into the lab and observing protocols towards transmission, Barnhart mentioned he utilized the mission not solely as a analysis program, but additionally as an academic alternative for pupil researchers to achieve a deeper understanding of the area engineering trade.
“The challenge, obviously, is to put in practices and techniques and procedures to minimize the potential risk and offer opportunities for [the student researchers] to learn as much as possible,” Barnhart mentioned. “Because, again, most students haven’t done this before … It gives them a grounding and it also gives them confidence.”
The launch of the satellite didn’t mark the top of the mission. Collaborators on Dodona proceed to carefully monitor the deployment of the satellite and talk with it on the floor station.
“Our next goal is to make sure that, once it detaches from that satellite, it actually does its job — it turns on properly, we’re able to communicate with it, take pictures [and] send messages back and forth,” Park mentioned.